


Winter Break

by Frea_O



Series: The Greaterverse [11]
Category: Chuck (TV)
Genre: Cabin Fic, F/M, Giant Dog, Hot Chocolate, Kid Fic, Lake Tahoe, Skiing, Snow, Vacation, snowball fights
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-22
Updated: 2014-04-10
Packaged: 2018-01-09 14:59:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 35,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1147363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frea_O/pseuds/Frea_O
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six adults, one five-year-old, one oversized half-grown dog, one week in the snow at Lake Tahoe. But no matter the temperature outside, things may just be heating up...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pregame

**Author's Note:**

> The previous story you might have seen named _Winter Break_ with the same synopsis is actually just a chapter in this story.

Most of the family was still asleep when Sarah let herself into the Bartowski house, but she still wasn’t surprised to find Chuck in the kitchen. Sure, he almost had his nose buried in a cup of coffee and there were bags under his eyes, but he was there. It had become a habit that was uniquely theirs. Spies, as a rule, didn’t have habits, as habits could get you killed. But Sarah had also never realized how comforting they could be.

“You don’t actually have to get up just to see me,” she said as she knelt to unclip Sir. They’d survived yet another morning run together. She liked to think they were even improving, and clearly the elephantine puppy agreed, for he flopped onto his back and offered his belly up for a rub.

“Nah, I needed to be up. S-stuff to do, codes to…code. Mmph.” He yawned, put his head on his crossed arms, and made snoring noises.

Sarah grinned. “Sleep is important, too, you know.”

Chuck’s head popped up. “Just kidding. Want some coffee?”

“I’ve got it.” Abandoning Sir after his belly rub, she grabbed the purple mug Violet had drawn bumblebees all over when they’d visited the clay firing place the month before and poured herself half a cup, dosing it with milk. She took the seat farthest from Chuck at the island. The longer their relationship-under-the-cover-relationship progressed under the watchful gaze of the government, the more being touched reminded her of how needy she felt—and besides, she didn’t exactly smell like daisies at the moment. “What’s up? Any reason you got up at—and these are your words, not mine—the butt-crack of dawn?”

Chuck’s smile was tinged with sleep at the edges in a way that made her ignore her libido. “Not really. Just wanted to see you.”

“Oh.”

“And it’s peaceful. No pitter-patter of gigantic paws. Lets me get my thoughts in order.” 

Sir chose that moment to nudge his head into Sarah’s lap. Clearly, her obligations to him had not ended with the run. She scratched his ears. “Oh yeah? And what are you thinking about?”

“Oh, stuff. I’m in charge of snacks for play group next week, there’s a pattern I spotted in the Intersect programming yesterday that might produce results, who’d win in a fight between Megatron and Godzilla, you.” Chuck shrugged. “Whether you actually know who Godzilla is.”

“I know who Godzilla is. Dork.”

“Nerd,” Chuck said, but he grinned. “But, that misnomer aside, I must say, I’m relieved. I don’t think I could date somebody that doesn’t know who Godzilla is.”

“Good thing it’s just a cover, then.” 

Chuck’s eyes cut to the camera mounted in the corner. The All-Seeing Eye, as he had referred to it on one of the very, _very_ few times they’d managed to escape surveillance. It was like having a third member in their illicit still-stuck-in-the-beginning-stages-because-holy-hell-was-the-government-good-at-running-surveillance-on-an-asset-nobody-was-aware-it-had relationship. Every action, every word, every gesture and look had to be measured against what an analyst sitting in a cubicle in Washington might see and interpret, when really Sarah honestly just wanted to grab Chuck and engage in a little mutual clothes removal. Judging from the way Chuck sighed and fiddled with his coffee mug now, he agreed.

“Yeah, just a cover,” was all he said.

Sarah spotted the way his mouth quirked to the left, and knew what that preceded. “Don’t you dare make a joke about me being out of your league otherwise,” she said, half-serious.

“I could be for inter-league play,” Chuck said, squinting at her. A challenge made his face light up. “You know, I could be out of _your_ league. After all, I have not only a five-year-old that I’m quasi-single parenting, but I also come with both mommy and daddy issues pre-loaded, and for the low, low price of three payments of twenty-nine ninety-five, you get a model of me equipped with most of our government’s secrets, including the true identity of the subject of Carly Simon’s chart-topping hit, _You’re So Vain_.”

Sarah blinked. “Did you actually flash on that?”

“It was on the radio.”

“So who is it?”

Chuck tapped his temple. “Twenty-nine ninety-five, remember?”

“Why is that even in the Intersect?”

“Last week I flashed on directions to the nearest IHOP. If I weren’t being paid the big bucks to disassemble the Intersect code, I’d say the person who designed the whole system was on crack—a theory, by the way, that I am not fully counting as off the table yet.”

“Good to know.” Sarah rose to put her mug in the sink. “I’d better get back to the Spy Casa. Casey wants to go over some reports after breakfast.”

“I’ll walk you to the front door.”

“No, no, it’s okay. I’ll see myself out. You stay put and think about Godzilla or something.” Sarah squeezed his wrist, the only contact she dared make, before she left the kitchen. Sir followed her, nosing at the treat pocket in hopes that another kibble bit would be forthcoming. And if she stopped at the door to give him a face-scrunch (and maybe a treat), she figured it was okay. 

Halfway across the lawn, though, she stopped when she heard Chuck calling her name. “Are you crazy?” she asked, watching him cross the lawn in his bare feet. “It’s freezing out here! Get back inside.”

“Quick question.” He hopped from foot to foot.

“You’re going to catch a cold,” Sarah said.

“I will if you keep interrupting.” His grin flashed. “I just want to know what I need to do to go about getting vacation.”

Sarah stared at him. “Vacation.”

“Yeah, you know, that thing you do where you go somewhere else, either really warm or really cold, and depending on the climate of the place you’re visiting, you do things that annoy the locals, like crowding the beach or skiing or renting a scooter and shouting rude Italian phrases back at the people who shouted them at you first.”

“I know what vacation is.”

“Well, here’s the thing.” Chuck hugged his arms closer to his chest, shivering openly. “Ellie and Awesome have a timeshare up in Tahoe.”

“I thought they weren’t going to be able to use it?”

“Somebody else offered to trade with them, and Ellie and Awesome can get off for the new time.” Chuck’s breath emerged in a fog around his face, and Sarah was tempted to shove him back inside. But he barreled on at ninety words a minute. “And they’ve invited Vi and me to go, and Vi loved it so much last year that I really want to take her again. Oh, and you. You’re invited, too.” 

“Oh.” Vacationing together when they were still keeping their cover to sleeping over every once in awhile—nights that had basically become torture—seemed like a big step, but Bartowskis never did anything in half-measures. Sarah frowned. “I’ve never had to ask for vacation before. It was assumed that if you came back from a mission and there wasn’t another one waiting, you were on your own time.”

“But what’s the procedure here?”

“When would you want to go?”

“Er, um, it’s next week. Super last minute notice, but…” He stopped hopping from foot to foot to meet her gaze, deadly serious now. “But I’d really like to go. To Tahoe. With you.”

Sarah’s stomach fluttered at the thought of what he wasn’t saying.

“And of course my sister, her boyfriend, Violet, my best friend, and the life of the party NSA agent we all know and love because apparently a cabin meant for four people is even better if you cram seven in for funsies.”

“Funsies?”

“Go with me here. So, do I need to talk to the bosses? Is it even possible?”

“I’ll talk to Beckman and Graham,” Sarah said. “I can’t promise anything yet.”

“You’re a lifesaver. Any idea when you’re going to do that, so I can tell Ellie something?”

“I’ll set up a conference call today,” Sarah said.

“ _Thank_ you.” Chuck stepped in for a hug, which made Sarah take a step backward. His brow creased in confusion. “What? I didn’t think there were cameras in this part of the yard.”

“There aren’t any. I’m just—you know, sweaty.” Sarah gestured at her jogging gear. “And you need to get inside before you lose a toe to frostbite. See you later, Chuck.”

“Bye.” His parting smile was warm enough that Sarah didn’t even feel the cold on the rest of the way to the Spy Casa, though she did have to take a minute just inside the doorway to gather her bearings. Casey was far more astute than either of them liked. Once she had collected her wits, she headed upstairs to take a shower and figure out how she was going to broach Chuck’s request with the bosses. 

* * *

“Vacation,” Casey said, as though the word was one that should not exist in any language known to humankind. “The nerd wants to go on vacation.”

“To Lake Tahoe. Apparently, Ellie and Devon have a timeshare on a cabin up there, and they want to get away for a few days next week.”

Casey’s scowl deepened to _Twilight Zone_ Marathon Night levels. But he stayed silent as he shoved a clip into one of the backup Glocks and placed the gun on a set of pegs. Cleaning the armory was a task carried out every two weeks. There were, of course, rules: Casey wasn’t allowed to touch the knives, Sarah wasn’t allowed near the Sig Sauer shelf, and the armory could only be cleaned when it had been confirmed that Violet was either in Pre-K or would be at least five miles away for the next three hours. 

“Tahoe,” Casey said.

“You got a problem with Tahoe?”

“It’s so…”

“So what?”

“Civilian.” Casey sneered. “We should at least at least convince the asset to let us pull some strings and make it a _real_ vacation. Tahoe. Ugh.”

“They like Tahoe. They went last year.” Sarah brushed grit from the box of smoke grenades, though that particular box was filled with a model they used in Afghanistan. Grit was the least of their worries. “I scheduled a conference with Beckman and Graham, and I’ve downloaded a map of the area so we can look over any security concerns.”

“You’re a little too excited about this, Walker.”

“Casey, I’ve been stuck in the suburbs, tracking down an inexplicable amount of drug dealers, weapons kingpins, and internationally-hunted terrorists that have all somehow managed to come into Los Angeles and have magically wandered into contact with Chuck.” Sarah shoved her hands through her hair, pushing it back away from her forehead. “I don’t feel like being excited to take a vacation is all that unreasonable.”

“Point.” Casey’s expression was more of a grin than a smirk, which was surprising in its own right. “Never thought I’d hear Wildcard Walker whining about the number of scumbags she’s had to sucker-punch.”

Sarah rolled her eyes at the nickname. The only ‘wildcard’ thing about her life now was the games of Uno she sometimes played with Violet. “Supposed to be some pretty good skiing up there.”

“You think we’re actually going to have time to ski?” Casey scoffed.

“I’m sure as long as we’re within a certain distance of Chuck, Graham and Beckman will let us keep surveillance duties minimal.”

Casey put the final Sig back on the shelf. “Nah,” he said. “They’ll never go for it.”

* * *

“That sounds like an excellent idea,” General Beckman said.

Beside her, Sarah felt Casey stiffen in surprise. “I beg your pardon, General?”

Beckman looked up. It was impressive that a woman no taller than five feet could regularly look down her nose at a giant like John Casey, really. “Did I stutter?” the woman asked. “I said a vacation sounds like an excellent idea. It’s become apparent that the operation end date is not in sight, which means that the temporary measures we undertook at the beginning of the Intersect project are not sufficient. Having the asset and his relatives away will give us time to set up more sustainable options.”

Despite her initial spasm of happiness, Sarah felt a chill at the back of her neck. “What options are these, General?”

Beckman lifted an eyebrow, as though Sarah had acted insubordinately. Sarah didn’t feel like her question was all that impudent. She was an operative on a long-term assignment. It was only fair that she knew what sort of changes were coming so that she could prepare for them.

“I’ll have a list of schematics and plans sent to your base by the end of the day tomorrow,” Beckman said. “There is no need to inform the asset. To give the agents enough time to work, we’ll extend the timeshare for a full week—on the government’s dime, of course—and see that Doctors Bartowski and Woodcomb have the vacation time. I’m sending agents ahead to scout the area for any security concerns and to prepare the house for any surveillance. Major Casey—”

“General, if I may?” Casey said, interrupting.

Both Beckman and Sarah gave him surprised looks.

“I’m led to believe we’ll all be staying together in close quarters. Wouldn’t digital surveillance be overkill, General?”

“I fail to understand what you mean, Major Casey.”

“It’s vacation, General.” Casey said. “By this point, we’ve been on this op for six months. You either trust us to watch the Intersect or you don’t. Beg pardon for speaking out of turn, but I could use a break.”

If it was at all possible, Beckman managed to look sourer than usual. Maybe they were serving lemons for lunch in the DNI boardrooms today, Sarah thought. But after studying both agents for a moment, their commander eventually nodded. “I will expect you to report in daily.”

Though an intense flood of relief filled her from the top of her head to the bottom of her feet, a relief so strong she could almost taste it, Sarah managed to keep her features perfectly cool and professional. “Verbal sitreps or do you need reports, as well?”

“It’s vacation, Agent Walker,” Beckman said, and she may not have looked pleased about it, but at least she had stopped the ‘sucking on something sour’ face. “I think we can manage with verbal sitreps. Alert Director Graham or myself if any problems arise. I expect your reports on the area and how you plan to run the minimal surveillance on my desk tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, ma’am,” they both said, and Beckman ended the conference.

By habit, both she and Casey waited to speak until they’d ended the connection on their side. Chuck’s blurted out comments had gotten the team in trouble a time or two when Beckman or Graham had had last minute additions for a set of orders. But the minute they stepped into the kitchen together, Casey turned and gave her an annoyed look. “You owe me,” he said.

“What?”

“You heard me. We speak of this no more, do you understand? I need to hit something.” And true to his word, he stomped off, already cracking his knuckles in anticipation of giving the training dummy a thorough beating.

For a moment, she stayed in the kitchen, absolutely unable to move while the inescapable truth stared her in the face.

Casey _knew_.

And he wasn’t going to turn them in.

For a moment, she nearly turned on her heel and chased after him, to demand how he’d figured it out and more importantly, how long he’d known about her illicit relationship with Chuck. But she stopped herself mid-turn. Maybe Casey didn’t know. Maybe he only suspected and this was some sort of test. She didn’t want to confirm that for him or—

“Since Disneyland, by the way,” Casey said, sticking his head in the door. He was wrapping his fist. “You didn’t quite avoid the cameras.”

Sarah whirled around. Her heart was pounding erratically in her chest, way too loudly for a simple conversation in the kitchen. “Disneyland was two months ago.”

“And you haven’t let it affect the mission at all, and more importantly, neither has the nerd, so as far as I care, it’s none of my business.” Casey’s scowl deepened into a look of pure crankiness. “If you’d slipped up, I’d have reported your asses already, but now I just don’t care. So keep it out of my direct sight and don’t _ever_ give me details about anything— _anything_ , I mean that—and we’re cool here. Got me?”

“Got it.”

“And you owe me, so you get to make the recon run to Tahoe to check out the cabin, not me.” He seemed oddly cheerful about that as he walked away, whistling.

Sarah remained in the kitchen, her mind absolutely blank. She and Chuck had talked about the ramifications of Casey finding out, a scenario that had always ended with Chuck stuck in a bunker and Sarah manning a desk in Siberia. It had always been one of those End of the World things, as Chuck was fond of putting it.

But Casey had known almost the whole time.

Holy hell.

And finally, she broke: a laugh bubbled up as it hit her all at once. Casey was fine with their relationship and even better, they were being sent to a remote, snowy cabin for an entire week, away from surveillance, on the government’s dime. Sarah sat down at her kitchen table and laughed until she felt sick.


	2. Tailgating

“And the doctors thought it was a lost cause, that she’d never keep the leg. But they’ve never met Dr. Charles Carmichael before now, have they?” Chuck made heart-monitor beeping noises as he leaned over the plastic toy. Part of the ramble was sheer delirium—he really shouldn’t have woken early to see Sarah, but those were his favorite times of the day sometimes—and part of it was just entertaining his spawn. You said, Chuck learned early on, a lot of really dumb things when you took up the mantle of parenthood. You also learned to fix a lot of broken things: scraped elbows, bruised shins, toys like Mr. Hoppy Horse. Speaking of which… “Hey, Megs, can you pass me the glue that’s by your elbow?”

There was no answer. Chuck looked up, wondering if he’d been talking to himself the whole time, but Violet was bent over the coloring book in absolute concentration.

“Earth to Megabyte,” Chuck said. “This is Earth, calling Megabyte. Bzzt. Megabyte, do you read me? Over.”

Vi jerked and looked up at him with a blue crayon clutched in her hand. “What?”

“You back yet?” Chuck asked.

Her little forehead puckered in confusion. “Back from where?”

“From wherever it was you were just hanging out.”

“But I haven’t left. I’m just coloring.”

“Sounds like something that somebody who was secretly visiting the planet Graxxthorp would say,” Chuck said, and he and Vi amused themselves by squinting suspiciously at each other for a second. “Hand me the glue, though, would you? A horse’s life is on the line here.”

“The what?”

“The glue—it’s that tubey thing at your elbow. Don’t let it bite you.”

She looked around and finally spotted it, handing it over. “Is Mr. Hoppy Horse going to be okay?”

“Minimal scarring, some tissue damage. I’m sure he’ll pull through with lots of rehab and therapy.” Thanks for that, Sir. Carefully, Chuck bent over his task, reattaching the horse’s chewed-off leg. He supposed he could have gone out and bought a new Mr. Hoppy Horse, but one of the realities of living with a half-grown puppy that only listened to females was the lost toys, and Chuck really didn’t want to shell out for an entirely new collection this far away from Christmas and Vi’s birthday.

“Now what?” Vi asked once the leg had been put to rights.

“Now we let his scars heal,” Chuck said.

“Whassat mean?”

“Gotta let the glue dry, Megabyte. Oh, there’s the door. You stay here and color, I’ll get that.” It was right around the time that Sarah would have talked to the bosses, and he had a feeling she was at the door to put the kibosh on the plans for Tahoe. So with a sinking stomach, he opened the front door right as Sarah was readjusting the carry-on bag over her shoulder. “Uh, wow, are we going somewhere?”

“No, just me. I’ve gotta run if I want to catch my flight, but I just wanted you to know, the bosses said yes.”

It took a few seconds for the words to break through. Chuck hoped he wasn’t gaping like a fish. “Wait—about Tahoe? The bosses said yes to that? We’re going on vacation?”

Sarah grinned. “Even better: we’re going on _unsupervised_ vacation.”

Again, the words didn’t immediately set in, but when they did, Chuck’s eyes widened. “Casey’s not going?”

“Casey is, but...” Sarah deliberately turned her face toward where it wouldn’t be visible to the interior security camera and then gestured using only her eyes. And Chuck immediately understood: they were not only going to Lake Tahoe together, there would be no cameras with the all-seeing eye on them. 

For three days, there would be no surveillance.

“Is this...is this heaven?” Chuck asked.

“It’s vacation.” Sarah gave him a very lascivious smile that made his blood pressure spike into dangerous territories. “More details later. I really do have to run, though.”

“Wait, where are you going?”

“Tahoe. I have to do recon. I’ll be back tomorrow, though, bright and early.” Sarah patted him on the arm and Chuck swore he was so ratcheted up from that look that he could feel the lingering heat from her hand, even though it was freezing outside. She read him like a book the way she always did, for she gave him a sunny grin and jogged off, carry-on bouncing against her hip as she headed for her car.

“Oh my god,” Chuck said as he watched her drive away. Three days in Lake Tahoe unsupervised (with the exception of Casey, and he was fairly confident they could dodge Casey). No matter what Sarah said, it wasn’t vacation. It was heaven. He felt like a kid five days before Christmas, knowing there was an entire pile of shiny gifts awaiting him but having to behave until then. This was going to be absolute torture.

“Daa-aad,” Violet said, coming up behind him. “It’s cold. Aunt Ellie says we’re not supposed to leave the door open when it’s cold.”

“Oh, right. You’re right.” Belatedly, he stepped back inside and closed the door. He followed her back to the table and focused on fixing the rest of Vi’s chewed-up fleet of toys, though his mind was whirling far too fast for him to really comprehend what he was doing.

“Why does Mr. Nightingale have a dinosaur leg now?” Vi asked, breaking his thoughts.

Chuck looked down at the disaster in his hands. The lion that Sir had half-chewed did indeed have a velociraptor leg now. Since _Because I’m distracted by the fact that I get to have sex with Sarah Walker soon_ didn’t seem like that great of an answer to give his five-year-old, he fell back on an innocent look. “You don’t think the leg makes him look dashing?”

“He’s a lion, not a fa-loss-a-raptor.”

“It’s like a really cool, claw-y prosthetic leg.”

Vi gave him a look that said she was five, not an idiot. With a rueful laugh, Chuck pulled the leg free (at least the glue hadn’t had time to set) and surveyed the rest of his work to make sure no other disasters had occurred. Apparently they were safe. “It was worth a shot,” he said.

She shook her head at him.

“Hey, criticize your own work, not mine,” Chuck said, shaking his head and making a silly face at the same time. “I’m fixing it, aren’t I?”

“You’re the best,” Vi said simply, and focused on her coloring again.

When he resumed his veterinary care on the chewed up toys, his cell phone buzzed with a new message from Sarah: _Bosses extended t-share to whole week._

Chuck had to read the message a couple of times to really understand the fact that it wasn’t going to be three days in the snow with Sarah—and no cameras—but seven. He choked, but quietly enough not to alert Vi, and sent Queen lyrics back in reply.

The response was almost immediate: _Pretty sure real life not fantasy. Bosses covering cost. What’s up with the horse?_

“Horse?” Chuck asked aloud.

“Hmm?”

“Your old man’s talking to himself like he’s losing it, nothing to worry about,” Chuck said, and then he remembered he’d been holding the drying Mr. Hoppy Horse in one hand when he’d talked to Sarah. He texted back the story and received a _Dumb dog!_ in reply.

He set both the cell phone and the appropriately fixed Mr. Nightingale off to the side and pushed himself to his feet, ambling over to study the calendar that took up half a wall in the kitchen. With narrowed eyes, he studied the week. He only had the government as a client now, so it wasn’t like he had to cancel anything, but Ellie and Awesome would have some trouble getting out of work—unless the bosses were overseeing that, too. They probably were, which would make things easier. Chuck didn’t notice any social events that they wouldn’t mind missing too much.

Until his eyes fell on the weekend at the end of their stay in the cabin. “Crap,” he said under his breath.

That was Sophie’s weekend to take Vi.

There was absolutely no chance of convincing her to come up to Lake Tahoe, Chuck knew. The cynical part of him pointed out that it was hard enough to convince Sophie to come as far as Burbank. He quashed that feeling, as it didn’t fit the positive life he was trying to live, and let out a long breath slowly, his cheeks puffing up as he thought the matter over. She was probably on set filming, but he took a risk and picked up his cell phone again.

“Where are you going?” Vi asked. 

“I’ve got to make a phone call. Why don’t you stay here and finish coloring your—” Chuck glanced at the coloring book, but Violet’s lines had made the drawing unrecognizable. “—thingamajig, and I’ll be right back.”

“It’s adult stuff again, isn’t it?”

“Hey, don’t be so quick to grow up, I like you tiny enough to squash like a bug.” Chuck tousled her hair. “So you never forget who’s king.”

“Uncle Awesome?”

“That’s exactly right. I’ll be right back.”

He stepped into the living room so that he would be able to listen for any catastrophe on Violet’s part and hit Sophie’s entry in his contacts. It was in the speed dial in case of emergencies, but he didn’t use the number much. He didn’t expect her to answer, so he nearly fumbled the phone when she picked up on the second ring.

“Chuck,” she said, and he could hear the wariness in her voice. “Is Violet okay?”

“Yeah, she’s fine. She’s in the other room coloring.”

“Oh. Then what’s up?”

He scratched at the back of his neck. “You’re not on set or anything? I’m not interrupting, right?”

“I’m in my trailer.” That was code: nobody was listening, which meant she could talk freely. “And alone. What’s she coloring?”

And that, Chuck thought, was the reason why he couldn’t hate Sophie Marston, even when he really wanted to. Bryce Larkin aside, he’d never really hated anybody, but every time he saw the look of sadness cross his daughter’s face, and every time she asked him why the others all had mommies to go to the playground with her and she only had an aunt, every time something like that happened, he wanted to hate Sophie Marston.

But he’d never quite managed.

“It looks like some kind of cross between a sea horse and Godzilla. She’s coloring it blue. She’s still on that kick.” Casey had mentioned he liked blue, but Casey was one of the things Chuck couldn’t tell Sophie about. “Listen, I’m calling about the weekend after next.”

On the other end of the line, Sophie paused. “I don’t think I’ll have to cancel. There’s no need to check on me all the time.”

“It’s not that,” Chuck said. “Ellie and Aw—Devon, they got a timeshare for that week, so I was wondering if it might be possible to switch weekends? That way we don’t have to cut our trip short.”

“Chuck, I can’t do that. You know how much work I put in place so that nobody will be able to spy.”

Chuck pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t suppose flying up to Tahoe and meeting us there would be an option?”

“Tahoe’s a pretty popular place this time of year. If I was spotted there, it would be noticed. And somebody might start putting pieces together.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her that that wouldn’t actually be a problem—the government had plenty of reasons to keep their Intersect out of the tabloids, and Sarah had already implied that they would be willing to pay millions to assist with any cover-ups—but he remembered at the last moment that he wasn’t allowed to inform Sophie of that. “You could be careful,” he said instead, and immediately wanted to kick himself.

“I’m _very_ careful, Chuck!” 

“I wasn’t saying you weren’t,” Chuck said. Every conversation with Sophie recently had gone like this. She was on the defensive even if he wasn’t on the offensive and they did nothing but circle around. No matter how many times he told himself that he understood, that she felt guilty and had probably always had that ‛lash out first’ mentality, that understanding was cold comfort when he was the one picking up the pieces of their daughter’s broken heart after Mommy cancelled or Mommy cut their weekend short. He ran his hand down his face. “Never mind. We’ll cut our trip early so we can make it back in time for you to pick her up. That’s fine.”

It was two days less with Sarah without the cameras, but Violet had to come first.

“Or we could just do it next month,” Sophie said.

“She wants to see you. You missed last month—”

“She’ll be having so much fun in the snow she won’t even miss me,” Sophie said. Her voice was light but Chuck could still detect a quaver in the words. “I’ll make it up to her next month.”

“Sophie—”

“Oh, they’re calling me back to set. I’ll send her a teddy bear or something. Bye, Chuck.”

“Bye,” Chuck said, but he was already left with dead air. He lowered the phone and stayed where he was for a moment, hand still over his face. When that moment had passed, he slipped the phone back into his jeans pocket. Another missed month. Sophie only saw Violet about fourteen times a year: one weekend per month and Christmas and Violet’s birthday. That was it. Sure, she paid child support and sent packages like clothing and other things, but it in no way made up for the fact that his child had an absent mother.

He looked up as he felt the garage door opening rumble through the house. Ellie had come home early from her shift, apparently.

Sure enough, the door to the garage opened, and he heard, “Chuck! Violet! Anybody home?”

“In here,” Violet called back. Chuck shoved all of his disappointment with Sophie back inside and ambled into the dining room, where he and Violet had set up camp for the coloring-and-or-veterinary-procedures of the afternoon.

Ellie set all of her shopping bags on the counter. “You’ll never guess what happened,” she said.

Chuck had a pretty strong suspicion he could. “You bought half of Los Angeles?” he guessed instead, counting the shopping bags. Some of them were groceries—which was his job this week, so he didn’t mind—but some of them were from Waldbaum’s, the local department store. “Or is that just a quarter? I can’t tell.”

“Oh, you think you’re so funny,” Ellie said, patting his cheek as she walked by.

“That’s ’cos he is,” Violet said, and she grinned up at Chuck as Ellie gave her a hug-snuggle combination and dropped a kiss on the top of her head. “He’s Dr. Charles Carmichael, and he fixed Mr. Hoppy Horse.”

“That dog again, huh?” Ellie asked, looking at the chewed up toys.

As one, they all turned to look out at the giant puppy napping in the sun on the back porch. “Yep,” Chuck said. “You had news?”

“The timeshare office called,” Ellie said, bustling back to the bags and beginning to unload the groceries. She shoved them toward Chuck, and he took this as a signal that he should put the food away. “There was a mix-up in the paperwork with our place and it wasn’t originally available for the time we swapped it for.”

“Oh, no,” Chuck said. “Does that mean we’re not going?”

“Actually, the opposite. They fixed the problem and they’re comping us for an entire week.”

“What?” He’d probably over-acted that, Chuck realized, when both Ellie and Violet blinked at his exclamation. He covered with a wide-eyed look. “They’re giving you an entire week up there? For free?”

“I know, isn’t it great?”

“What’s a timeshare?”

“Do you remember last year,” Ellie said, coming around the counter to crouch beside her niece and smooth back her hair, “when we got to play in the snow? It’s okay if you don’t remember, you were really little then.”

Violet scrunched her face up. “Kinda?”

“It’s where we got Bun-Bun,” Chuck said.

Immediately, Violet’s face cleared as the information obviously dawned. “Ohhh! Are we going back there? I liked that place. Are we getting another Bun-Bun?”

“You don’t like the Bun-Bun you have?” 

“Yes, but isn’t more better?” 

Ellie laughed and deliberately moved so that Violet’s attention would be on her instead of Chuck. “We’re going back to Lake Tahoe,” she said. “And it will be really fun. They’ve got lots of snow this year, so we’ll build snowmen and have lots of hot chocolate. Won’t that be fun?”

“Is Uncle Morgan coming again?”

“Regretfully, yes,” Ellie said.

“And Daddy?”

“I wouldn’t miss it. And Sir, and Uncle Devon, too, they’re coming, too,” Chuck said, since he knew those questions were next.

“What about Major Casey Sir?” Violet narrowed her eyes, as if expecting to be challenged. “And Sarah, too, Sarah _can’t_ miss it.”

Ellie shot Chuck a smug look over her shoulder, and Chuck shrugged. He wasn’t going to argue if his daughter wanted Sarah there. The feeling was mutual. “That’s up to them, but they’ve been invited, so we’ll see,” Ellie said.

“Sarah said she’s game,” Chuck said, and he remembered that since he’d only found out about their stay being a whole week, Sarah wouldn’t know either. “Well, for a couple of days. I’ll have to talk to her about staying the whole week.”

“Maybe she can visit some of the Tahoe restaurants for her blog,” Ellie said, rising to her feet and moving back around to help Chuck put the food away.

“Maybe. She could use a vacation just like the rest of us, though, so I don’t know.” Curiosity had him poking through some of the Waldbaum’s bags; he lifted an eyebrow as he pulled out a tiny purple jacket. “What’s this?”

“Oh, that was supposed to be a surprise,” Ellie said, but Violet had already spotted it. She whooped as she raced across the kitchen to try the parka on.

Chuck winced. “Sorry.”

“Not a big deal. There’s one in there for you, too. Yours was getting a little ragged last year.”

“You didn’t have to do that, you know,” Chuck said as he dug through the bag to find his new coat. It was a lot fancier than one he would have bought himself. 

“I wanted to. I don’t feel obligated, Charles.” Ellie raised an eyebrow at him as she helped Violet zip up her new coat. “There, Vi-Baby, what do you think? Gonna be warm enough?”

Vi spun circles in place, her arms out. “I love it, I love it, I love it.”

“Guess she likes it, then. Go check it out in a mirror, baby-cakes. And try yours on, Chuck. I want to make sure I got the size right. If it’s too small, I can exchange it on the way to work tomorrow.”

As Vi scampered off to preen in front of the mirror in the front hallway, Chuck pulled the jacket on. It was a dove-gray color and much warmer than the ratty jacket he’d been wearing for years, which he’d bought at a military surplus store in Palo Alto, when he’d finally worn out the jacket his father had left behind. He wouldn’t even need to layer a couple of hoodies underneath this one. “Nice, El. Thanks.”

“It looks good on you. Which is good because I hired a photographer and we’re getting a family picture done in the snow.”

“Aha, the ulterior motive reveals itself.”

“And you and Sarah could maybe get some pictures that are just the two of you,” Ellie said. “And maybe some with Vi, too.”

“Subtle, sis. Real subtle.”

Ellie’s smirk told him that she knew exactly what she was doing and felt absolutely no shame. “You’ll want those pictures someday, trust me.”

Someday wasn’t something Chuck was really allowed to think about when he was still the Intersect, but he kept the smile plastered on his face as he shook his head at her. “You think you’re so smart.”

“That’s because I am, duh.”

“I beg to differ, but thank you for the coat.” Chuck gave her a hug right as Vi came running back into the kitchen, which of course meant that she made a beeline straight for them, crashing into Ellie and wrapping herself around Ellie’s waist. Chuck broke the hug with a laugh, though Vi continued to cling to her aunt. “What do you say, Megabyte, when somebody gives you something?”

“Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

“Guess that’s it, then,” Ellie said, picking Vi up and setting her on the island counter, which was a sign that she was about to start dinner. “We’re going to Lake Tahoe.”

“It’s going to be _so_ much fun,” Violet agreed, nodding sagely.

Chuck certainly hoped so. He decided he’d wait to bring up the conversation with Sophie until much, much later. There was no need to put a storm cloud on anybody else’s day, after all.


	3. Kickoff

_Casey knows._

The words had haunted him for nearly a week after Sarah had texted them to him on her way to Tahoe. It had taken him two days alone to be able to meet Casey’s eye, and when he had, he’d found the NSA agent smirking at him. Sarah had called from Lake Tahoe the night she’d sent the text and they’d discussed it, vaguely, using code-speak in case the government was listening (they were always listening) and even though Chuck might be feeling itchy and foolish and like a teenager again, waiting to get to Lake Tahoe so that he and Sarah could finally have some private time together, he couldn’t get past the idea that Casey had known about the two of them almost all along. And even more, that he hadn’t breathed a word to the bosses.

“Does he want something?” Chuck asked the first chance he got, which was when they were at CVS an hour outside of Burbank picking up supplies for the road trip upstate. Sarah had rented a sporty SUV that would handle the snow much better than either of their cars. “Is that why he hasn’t said anything?”

“Probably.” She picked up a bag of almonds and flipped to the nutritional data on the back, making a contemplative sound in her throat.

“Why are you not freaking out about this more? Shouldn’t you be freaking out? It’s your job on the line.”

“And his, too.” She put the almonds back.

“Wait—what?”

“He’s known since January. It’s March. He knows that if he reports us, I can turn right back around and say he was in on it.”

Chuck, in the middle of reaching for Sarah’s preferred brand of water, turned and gaped. “That’s a little...”

“Cold? Probably. Survival of the fittest.” She selected the Cracker Jack box and dropped it in the shopping basket Chuck held. “I think he told me so that we’d stop sneaking around and he can figure out what’s suspicious and what isn’t. That way, he can focus on the real dangers.”

“And he doesn’t care?”

“Or he doesn’t want to think about it,” Sarah said. “I mean, he’ll still threaten us if he thinks we’re getting too touchy-feely.”

“With Casey, too touchy-feely is just looking at you.”

Sarah grimaced. “I’m choosing not to look the gift horse in the mouth.”

She pinched his ass before she walked away.

“Well, that was quite a yelp,” Ellie said, coming around the corner from the next aisle over. “Got everything? I think Devon’s a little antsy to get on the road since they’re calling for snow overnight in Carson City.”

“I, uh, yeah.” Belatedly, he remembered to grab two Red Bulls, and Ellie pulled a face. 

“That stuff rots your insides.”

“This sweet, sweet elixir of life? Ellie, you crush me.” He set both cans in the basket and snatched up a bag of dill pickle potato chips on the way by, which only made Ellie roll her eyes at him. “It’s a long road trip, and I will not only have a small child in the car with me, but a half-grown elephant who already threw up the tranquilizers we tried to feed him. Take pity on me.”

“You forgot your super-hot girlfriend,” Ellie said.

“Aw, Ellie, I didn’t know you cared,” Sarah said as she strolled up with magazines tucked under her arm. Chuck perked up; she’d grabbed one of his favorites, and he hadn’t read that issue yet. Suddenly the idea of being stuck in the car with Sir didn’t seem so bad.

Ellie spread her hands wide. “I am just pointing out the facts here. Got everything?”

“Yep.”

“We really should have stopped for stuff before we left,” Ellie said as the cashier, who’d looked pretty bored until the three of them had come into the store, began to ring them all up. “Or stocked up yesterday or something.”

“To be fair, we were all kind of busy.” A mission had kept Casey, Sarah, and Chuck out late. Thankfully, it had ended well, with the actual Nigerian scammers sitting in an NSA holding cell now, and Ellie and Devon had been called to cover shifts for doctors that had been stuck in bed with the flu. Only Morgan had had a drama-free night, but then, he’d just been watching _A New Hope_ with Violet. They were leaving Burbank later than they’d hoped, as Ellie had gotten called in again, but with any luck they would reach the cabin before midnight. “Besides, this is fine. We’re not taking too much time out of the trip.”

“Yeah, but you know how Devon gets on road trips,” Ellie said.

Sarah pulled out her credit card to swipe before either of the Bartowski siblings could reach theirs. If she paid, Chuck knew, the treats were on the government’s dime, so he didn’t complain. Though General Beckman might when she got the bill.

“Last chance to trade one oversized elephant puppy for Morgan,” Chuck said when they’d sorted out the bags between the two cars.

It spoke of her relationship with Morgan that Ellie actually looked tempted. But she glanced at Sarah and then Chuck for a brief second. “No, no, I think the setup we have here is fine. You two with Vi and the dog, and the rest of the adults in our car, that’s a good setup. We’ll stick to that.”

“You might need a spray bottle to keep him and John from fighting,” Sarah said, and Ellie laughed as they split off for their cars. Morgan sat in the driver’s seat of Sarah’s rental, drumming silently against the steering wheel. In her seat in the back, Violet lay passed out, one hand still clutching Bun-Bun.

“She wake up at all?” Chuck asked.

“Out like a light the whole time. See you when we stop for gas.” Morgan raced off to join the ‛adult car,’ as he’d put it earlier.

“Your sister’s being really subtle,” Sarah said as she started the car.

“Yeah, that’s a problem with her lately.” He’d noticed right away that Ellie had devised it so that Chuck and Sarah were off in the rental with Vi and their dog (for Sir really was Sarah and Violet’s dog) like their own little family unit. “It doesn’t bother you, does it?”

“It’s okay, she’s just excited.” They pulled back onto the freeway, following Devon’s SUV. In the backseat next to his human, Sir began to whine a little, so Chuck twisted in his seat to give the dog’s ears a scritch. Sir’s whine softened. “Though if it’s like that all week, I don’t know how long it’ll be okay.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Chuck said. Sir nosed his hand, making him laugh softly.

“No, don’t do that, I can deal.”

“We’ve been ‛seeing each other’ for, like, six months. She’d be coming on a little strong even if you weren’t secretly my government-assigned handler and I weren’t the equally-secret holder of the secrets of the universe. Well, the universe as the US government sees it, anyway.”

Sarah’s answer to that was a smile.

“You okay with driving?” Chuck asked, mostly to change the subject. 

Sarah’s snort reminded him that she was indeed a spy and had likely handled much harder assignments. Spy or not, though, Chuck reached out and wrapped his fingers around the hand she had resting on her thigh. She turned the hand over, linking their fingers together. 

“Let me know if you change your mind,” he said, and closed his eyes to get a little shuteye while he could.

* * *

The first fat flakes had begun to fall when they pulled into the driveway of the cabin. Chuck had convinced Sarah to let him drive at least a little bit, so he leaned over the steering wheel, peering out into the night sky overhead. “We got here just in time, I think,” he said in a hushed voice. Both parties in the backseat had fallen asleep nearly two hours before.

Sarah yawned. She liked snow, but after a long ride in the car with an overtired young child, she didn’t really care about admiring it at the moment. “Not going to argue with you there. Which one do you want?” 

As one, they twisted to look in the backseat. “You know what? I’ll be lenient this time,” Chuck said. “You take the kid. I’ve got Morgan.”

“You’re not actually going to carry him inside, are you?” 

“He’d sleep through it, but no, I think not,” Chuck said, climbing out of the car. 

Morgan lay sacked out over the backseat. During their last stop for gas, they’d swapped him for the dog, as the other car had a free adult to sit in the backseat with Sir and calm him down.

Sarah had almost preferred having the whining dog to Morgan, though she was never going to tell Chuck that.

Ellie dashed past them to turn on cabin lights and make sure the heater was on as Sarah undid all of the buckles and straps. For a moment, she debated whether or not to put the girl’s jacket on, but it was only a short trip to the front door and maneuvering into a jacket would wake her. So in the end, she just pulled the girl out of the carseat and hurried for the door. Chuck and Morgan, she decided, could bring in all of their bags from the trunk.

Ellie held open the door for her to squeeze through with Violet. 

“What are the sleeping arrangements?” Sarah asked. “Is she in with Chuck and me, or...?”

“I think she’ll be okay on the couch. John and Morgan can take the loft bedroom.”

Oh, thank god, Sarah thought, but she didn’t say anything. Having Violet sleep in the same room as them would have put a serious damper on her plans. She moved over to the couch in the cabin’s living room and carefully deposited Violet there.

“I’m going to go put hot chocolate on,” Ellie said. “So we can all have a nightcap before bed.”

“Good idea. I’ll go help with—oh, no, they got everything already, it looks like.”

Sir ambled in, sniffing experimentally and getting underfoot as Chuck, Casey, Devon, and Morgan brought in the bags and coolers of food, stamping their feet on the mat so as not to track in any snow.

Casey took one look around the living room, which was decorated rustically with an actual deer head mounted on the wall, and grunted. “Good night,” was all he said, and headed for the stairs. Apparently Ellie had already briefed him on the sleeping arrangements.

“He’s missing out on some fantastic cocoa,” Chuck told Sarah as he brought over Violet’s Dora the Explorer suitcase and the mesh bag full of her toys that they had brought along. He dug out pajamas. “If you want to take the luggage to the room, I think we’re the bedroom on this floor.”

Close to Violet, Sarah realized. It was the smallest of the three bedrooms, but she didn’t mind. “Sure,” she said and grabbed their bags, yawning again. Weariness had settled in around the same time Morgan had switched over to their car. She unpacked first her bag and then Chuck’s bag, pushing their garments into adjacent drawers and shaking her head at her spy instincts that screamed at her to just leave the bags packed, that it made for a faster getaway. This was a family vacation, not a mission. 

She left their toiletry kits sitting atop the room’s dresser, and Chuck’s laptop on the desk. She’d just unpacked the final touches into the night stand on her side of the bed when he nudged his way inside, holding two cups of hot chocolate.

“Courtesy of Ellie,” he said. “Her orders are that we sleep until we can sleep no more. Which is not possible with a certain sprog of mine around, but it’s a noble goal and I say we stick to it.”

Sarah’s yawn cut off her reply, so she just took the hot chocolate and sipped. “You want the bathroom first?”

“You look like you’re asleep on your feet. You go first. I can get some work done while I wait.”

“Nerd,” Sarah said, giving him an affectionate kiss on the cheek as she passed. For a brief moment, she considered her exhaustion and was tempted to do more, but she hadn’t done a thorough check for bugs in the room. So it was better not to go there...yet. “By the way, I haven’t fully checked the place over yet, so we’ll have to be careful.”

Chuck’s eyebrows went up. “Oh,” he said, drawing the word out to several syllables. Sarah might normally have rolled her eyes at how obvious he was being, but right then, she found it kind of adorable. He really would make the worst spy ever. “Oh, I guess that means we’ll follow orders and just get a lot of sleep.”

“You’ll need it,” Sarah said, giving him a smile that made him visibly turn red and gulp, and she slipped into the bathroom.

* * *

His left foot woke him.

More because it was cold than anything else. Somehow or other, and he was going to guess that ‛somehow’ had something to do with Sarah, who’d not only stolen most of the blankets but also his left arm and most of the real estate on the mattress so his left foot had been freed from the covers and lay exposed. It was nothing but a foot-shaped block of ice anymore.

The clock on Sarah’s side of the bed told him it was just after seven, which meant Violet would be getting up soon. And that meant he should be getting up soon, too, but it felt nice just to lay there and drowse, wrapped around Sarah. Some of her hair tickled his nose and he could feel her chest rising and falling in steady sleep against his arm.

This moment was perfection, but it really was too bad about his left foot. He was really going to miss that foot.

A knock at the door made Sarah stir. “Come in,” Chuck called softly, recognizing it.

Violet, her hair a mess around her face, poked her head inside. “Did you see, Daddy?” she asked in a loud whisper. “Daddy, did you see? Huh?”

“See what, Megabyte?” Because he felt Sarah waking up, he reached an arm out in invitation. Violet needed no further urging to clamber onto the mattress and wriggle in on his other side.

Sarah’s eyes opened a minor slit. “’Morning,” she said, reaching an arm across Chuck to smooth down Vi’s hair, which was sticking up in all directions, wayward curls all over the place. Vi beamed. “Did you sleep good?”

“A-yup. Did you see?”

“I just woke up, sweetie.” Sarah rested her chin on Chuck’s shoulder.

“What is this mysterious thing you’re wanting us to see, huh?” Chuck asked.

“Snow!” Violet threw both hands up in delight.

“Oh yeah? How much snow?” 

“Look, look, look.” Violet wiggled free of Chuck and crawled down the length of the bed, tumbling off and sprinting for the window. When she yanked up the blind, Chuck had to squint against the white light that flooded the room. It wasn’t much in reality, but his eyes had been fully adjusted to the dark.

“Uh, wow,” Sarah said as she extricated herself from the stolen covers. She crossed the room to join Vi, peering out through the blinds, and Chuck took the opportunity to stick his frozen foot under the covers again. It prickled as feeling began to return. “I knew the forecast had called for a little snow last night, but I didn’t realize it was that much. There was definitely not that much on the ground when we got here last night.”

“Sounds like Uncle Awesome and Aunt Ellie are gonna get some good skiing in today, huh?” Chuck said.

Vi craned her neck to look at him, fearfully. “Do we have to ski?”

“Nope.” Sarah scooped Vi up under the armpits and swung her as she toted her back to the bed. “That much snow demands a snowman.”

“Or five!”

“Five? That’s pretty ambitious.” Sarah deposited Vi on the mattress and crawled back under the covers.

Vi immediately rolled over so that she was lying directly on top of him, resting her chin on her folded arms so that she could study him earnestly. Chuck wrinkled his nose at her. She wrinkled her nose back. “What’s going on? Why aren’t we getting up yet and playing in the snow?” 

“Because,” he said, “the first rule of snow days is you have to sleep in. It is law.”

“Oh, okay,” Violet said, and yawned. When Chuck pulled up the covers, she obligingly climbed beneath them, and snuggled in between him and Sarah, which made him wince. Her feet were even icier than his were. The minute they got out of bed, he was going to dig out her socks. “And then we’ll build snowmen?”

Chuck reached across her so that he could lace his fingers through Sarah’s. “Maybe we’ll have a really big breakfast first.”

Vi frowned. “And then we’ll build snowmen?”

“And then we’ll build snowmen,” he said, and left foot perfectly warm, he fell asleep again.


	4. Interleague Play

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has also been posted as a standalone story a couple of years ago, so if it feels incredibly familiar, that's why. Things have changed in the chapter, though.

Pure luck had Sarah glancing up from the snowman just in time to see Violet’s eyes widen at something behind her. Before the five-year-old noticed, Sarah cut her gaze back down to the ground, and watched in her peripheral vision as Violet’s grin turned impish and she nodded. Sarah kept her movements nonchalant. “That looks pretty good,” she said, rising to her full height and dusting off her hands. “We’ll have to come up with a—”

She broke off mid-sentence and struck, twisting at the waist, grabbing the front of the unsuspecting Chuck’s parka, and yanking. She had just a glimpse of Chuck’s face—switching from sly to startled—before he hit the ground, back first thanks to a Hand-to-Hand Combat 101 takedown. Sarah pounced. “Quick, Violet, get him!”

“Oh no!” Chuck said. He tried to squirm away, but Sarah had him pinned. Violet needed no further prompting to grab a double fistful of snow and shove it down the neck of Chuck’s parka.

He groaned and tried to scramble away from Sarah. “Cold! So very, very cold!”

“Say uncle,” Violet said, dancing out of the way on her pink snow boots.

Chuck struggled harder. By now, Sarah was laughing almost too hard to hold him down, especially when Violet dove in a second time, dropping snow on Chuck’s hat and darting away.

“Say uncle, Daddy!”

“Never. I’ll never surrender to the likes of you, snow pirate!” Chuck flung his hands up dramatically before going still. It surprised Sarah so much that she didn’t have time to stop the faceful of snow he shoved at her, or the tackle. At least the ground had been softened by several feet of precipitation, or she’d have been out of breath from more than laughing too hard.

Chuck caught her around the waist, holding her down. “We’ve got her now, Vi!”

Violet’s grin widened and she bent at the waist to scoop up more snow. Snow that would be very, very cold down the back of her jacket. She lay still, though she knew twelve different ways to break free, until Violet came at her, grin in place. Out of the child’s gaze, Sarah’s right hand tightened around a clump of snow.

Just as Violet nearly came into reach, Chuck said, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this, kid.”

“Trap!” Violet shrieked and jumped back. “It’s a trap!”

Sarah laughed, twisted out of Chuck’s reach, and chased Violet across the lawn. Violet ran in a zigzag pattern, howling and shrieking, and making other animal noises from her arsenal. She wasn’t too fast on the snow. Sarah could have caught her easily, but she let the girl have her fun. When she spotted Chuck cutting across the side of the yard, she met Chuck’s glance, caught the message, and nodded. They shared a secret smile before Sarah took off after Violet, herding her toward the other half of the yard—where Chuck popped out from behind a pine tree and snatched the girl up as she shouted. “Victory is mine!”

“Rematch! Rematch!” Violet wriggled so hard that Sarah saw Chuck wince and set her down before he could drop her. “Rematch!”

“We’re not going to finish the snowman?” Sarah asked.

Violet’s eyes lit up and her mouth dropped open in a comical exaggeration of shock. “Oh, right! I forgot. Can we name him Squidward?”

“Squidward the Snowman?”

That was apparently the funniest thing Violet had ever heard, since she fell to the ground, overcome with giggles. Sarah opened her mouth to say something, but a streak of white cut across her vision and smacked Chuck in the chest.

“What the—hey!”

Sarah whipped around to see Morgan grinning at them from the deck of the cabin. He was holding more ammunition. “Take cover,” Chuck said, snatching up Violet and ducking behind a tree. 

Sarah dove behind a tree a few feet away from them just in time: Morgan’s next snowball caught the tree truck where her stomach had been, smashing into a white cloud and raining snow down on her.

Chuck packed a snowball and heaved it, but Morgan had already taken cover on the other side of the yard. Only his footprints were visible to show that he’d even been there in the first place. “All right, gang,” Chuck said in a loud whisper that carried to Sarah’s hiding spot, “here’s the situation. We’ve got a bogey in our territory.”

“What’s a bogey?”

“Your Uncle Morgan. And he needs to be dealt with. Megabyte, you’re in charge of supplies. Pack as many snowballs as you can, but make ’em good and tight. We want Grimes on the ground pleading for mercy when we’re done.”

“Aye-aye, sir!”

“Walker, you’re in charge of reconnaissance.”

“Why do I have to do recon? I have better aim.”

“Oh yeah?” Chuck’s lips quirked up. “And just how many snowball fights have you been in, young lady?”

Sarah’s missile caught him right in the chest. She gave herself time enough for only one giggle at the shocked look Chuck gave her before she took off, racing for the trees and for safety. “Traitor!” Chuck called after her. “Dirty, rotten traitor!”

Sarah slowed, spun in place, and stuck her tongue out at him. She had to dodge a snowball, but it was worth it. She circled all the way around the cabin, going the opposite way Morgan’s footsteps indicated he’d gone. It felt unfair to use her spy skills to get ahead in a backyard snowball fight, but she didn’t care; she tracked Morgan to his hiding spot, set herself up two feet away, and waited until he’d turned.

He jumped about three feet in the air. “Gah!”

“Shh, you’ll give us away.”

“What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be on Chuck’s side.”

“He’s got Violet with him. This way, we’re evenly matched.”

Morgan’s brow furrowed underneath his Oscar the Grouch hat as he thought this over. “Oh, man, you’re saying I have all of the tactical advantage in a snowball fight as a five-year-old, aren’t you?”

“If that five-year-old is Violet, yes,” Sarah said, amused.

“Only fair,” he said. “What’s the game plan?”

“Hit Chuck. Don’t get hit. Spare Violet if you feel you must.”

“You’re kind of ruthless.”

“So?”

“It wasn’t a criticism. Let’s do this.”

They sneaked around the side of the cabin, Sarah leading the way. She would have preferred better camouflage than the bright blue parka and jeans, but she wasn’t going to cover herself to look like a yeti just for a backyard brawl. Morgan walked along behind her, unnaturally loud—did he not realize the point of sneaking?

They made it successfully to the tree line with nary a projectile hurtled their way.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Morgan whispered as they took cover behind a boulder.

“You think it’s a trap?”

“I think it’s—”

Sarah turned and fired off a snowball. It hit a tree about eight or so feet from Violet, and she saw the girl’s eyes widen in shock, and then her shoulders shake with laughter. “Missed me!” she called.

“Oh, is that right?” Morgan surged to his feet to chase her, but Sarah grabbed his arm. “What?”

“Decoy,” Sarah said, and threw a snowball at a tree in a completely different direction. She heard the “Hey!” as it connected, and smirked. “See?”

“Damn,” Morgan breathed. “How do you do that?”

Sarah shrugged. “You take Violet. I’ll get Chuck.”

“Yeah, I just bet you will.” Morgan wiggled his eyebrows and took off before Sarah could think about throwing a snowball at him. He raced across the snow, taking a couple of hits from Chuck along the way, his arms up to protect his head as he ran. “I’m coming for you, Monster Megabyte!”

“Ooh, scary,” Violet said, but she was already running. Sarah counted to ten in her head and moved around the opposite side of the boulder. She ran at a half-crouch, darting from one tree to the next. She could feel snow melting against the back of her parka, soaking her turtleneck. It would be uncomfortable in time, but right now it didn’t bother her.

Chuck surprised her, which she would have to give him credit for later. She’d figured him to be hiding behind a tree about ten yards off, but either he was faster than she thought or simply sneakier. As Sarah ran past a tree, she caught movement to her left, but not quickly enough. Chuck tackled her, catching her around the midsection and dragging her to the ground with him in a little ditch in the yard. The following wrestling match was short, furious, and very snowy. 

Sarah eventually broke off only because she was laughing too hard, allowing Chuck to roll and pin her to the ground. “You—you—”

“What? What is it?”

Giggles escaped even though she had both hands over her mouth. Finally, she blurted out, “Snow beast!”

“What?” Chuck looked affronted, which somehow made the fact that both his eyebrows and his stubble were covered with snow look even more ridiculous. “What are you talking about?”

Sarah just laughed harder.

Violet streaked around the corner, still running from Morgan, and all but skidded to a stop. She took one look at Chuck and said, “Santa? Is that you, Santa?”

Tears streamed as Sarah kept giggling. Chuck did indeed resemble the toymaker from the north, as snow had stuck to his chin and the hair sticking out from under his cap, turning it frosty white. He was ruddy-cheeked from the cold, too, his eyes bright from exertion. Though, and she knew this because he was mostly on top of her, keeping her down, in no way did he have anything close to a belly that jiggled like a bowl full of jelly.

He grinned. “So I look like Santa Claus, huh. Well, c’mere, elf.”

“No way,” Violet said, and took off again. A second later, Morgan appeared around the same corner.

“Whoa,” he said. “Get a room, you two.”

Chuck threw a snowball at him, and Morgan laughed as he escaped to go hunt down Violet. Chuck cast a glance after them, looked down at her, and wordlessly rolled off. Immediately, cold air rushed in over her, and Sarah realized that snow had indeed gone up the back of her jacket, no doubt because she’d rucked it up during her wrestling match with Chuck. She sat up and wriggled a bit to get most of the cold and wet out, breathing hard thanks to her laughter and the elevation. Still not speaking, she leaned against the boulder. Chuck joined her, and they watched Morgan and Violet chase each other and throw bits of snow at each other. The first thing she would do when they went back inside, she swore, was to check for bugs and make sure Beckman and Graham had been completely serious that this was a low-surveillance week.

In the meantime, though, she glanced at Chuck and giggled. “Hold still,” she said, and tried to brush most of the snow off of his hair and face. It took some doing, as the snow was even clinging to his eyelashes. “You really did look exactly like Santa Claus.”

“Ho, ho, ho,” Chuck said.

Sarah grinned. “Are you calling me a ho?”

“Yes. Three times,” Chuck said without missing a beat. “So that makes you three times the ho that you think.”

“Careful,” Sarah said, though she was smiling. “I’m armed.”

Chuck made a point of looking her down head to toe, so lasciviously that Sarah felt heat begin to spread through her belly. As always, she was surprised by the intensity of her reaction, and almost vaguely embarrassed. There was a five-year-old running around, and no matter how many times Chuck reassured her it wasn’t the case, it sometimes felt like Violet Bartowski could indeed read minds. “I don’t see any weaponry,” Chuck said, his voice dropping into the lower register. He leaned toward her.

Sarah shifted her head so that her lips were right beside Chuck’s ear, making him shiver. “I’m afraid I’m wearing far too many layers for you to see it, but I promise you, it’s there.”

“Maybe we should sneak away, take care of that little—gah!”

Snow rained on them from overhead, a cold avalanche that poured over their heads and down their jackets.

Sarah shrieked and leaped to her feet, already chasing after the culprits. Violet dropped the jacket they’d been using to transport the snow, easily abandoning her comrade in arms for safer pastures. Behind her, Sarah heard Chuck’s aggravated “Morgan!” and hoped he wouldn’t be too merciful when he caught their bearded foe.

“Hooligans!” Ellie’s shout cut across the yard and had all four combatants stopping and turning, even Sarah. “It’s getting late and you’re all soaked. Hot chocolate’s ready!”

At the mention of cocoa, a reluctant truce was called and the warring parties headed in together, shedding gloves, scarves, and hats. In the mudroom, Sarah peeled out of her jacket while Chuck helped Violet out of hers. “And I thought,” Chuck said as he opened the zipper, “they smelled bad on the outside!”

“First Hoth joke of the day for the win,” Morgan said from the bench where he was struggling out of his snow boots.

Sarah didn’t think any of that was English, though Violet was giggling.

“C’mon, wampa, let’s get some hot chocolate before Aunt Ellie drinks it all.”

They left a pile of dripping boots and accessories on the floor to be dealt with later and trooped into the kitchen together. Sarah lingered, absurdly reluctant to follow the others. She told herself she just needed a minute, though she knew better. A year before, a trip to Tahoe would have been a couple of days of snowboarding, possibly from helicopter, in the roughest terrain, and nights at the casinos as whatever cover she and Bryce were playing at the time. There would have been the finest champagne, always perfectly chilled. The staff would have known their names, would have waited on them politely, discreetly, with a smile and an open hand.

Now Tahoe meant a prolonged snow war, crammed into a cabin with far too many people, with hot chocolate and science-fiction references, and Ellie less-than-subtly poking at the fact that she wanted Chuck-and-Violet to become Chuck-and-Sarah-and-Violet.

Why didn’t she miss her old life more?

“Sarah?” Chuck poked his head around the edge of the door. “Something the matter?”

“No, no, not all. Just, ah, daydreaming.”

“I’m going to pretend it’s about how impressive I am in a snowball fight,” Chuck said, grinning.

The devil inside Sarah made her grin back as she patted his cheek. “You made the most adorable little squeal when I hit you.”

Most men would have coughed or taken affront at being emasculated; Chuck just smirked and grabbed her wrist when she would have lowered her hand. “See? An impressively adorable little squeal. I still hear the word impressive.”

“Sure.”

“C’mon, hot chocolate’s getting cold. You want whipped cream on yours?”

“Sure,” Sarah said again, and let him pull her inside.

Morgan and Violet had already found seats at the table, and Ellie was standing by the counter, idly flicking through a magazine. She didn’t look up at her brother or Sarah. “You two, being late, get to doctor yours yourselves.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Chuck said with a mock salute. He dropped Sarah’s hand to go fix the hot chocolate up from a pot at the stove, waving that Sarah should take a seat at the table. “Where’s the hellion? I’m surprised he wasn’t out with us catching snowballs and wreaking havoc.”

“The beast is in the garage. Casey and Devon are out trying to fix up the old snowmobile.”

Chuck snorted. “Good luck with that.”

“You say that only because you and Morgan couldn’t get it working last year. Sounds like jealousy, brother mine.”

“It’s a demonic beast,” Morgan said as Sarah sat down. She didn’t bother to push her chair in; the second she sat, Violet scrambled over to sit in her lap, nearly slopping hot chocolate over both of them. Thankfully, Sarah saved the mug before she could get drenched, though Violet was plenty damp from their snow battle. “It works for no man.”

“That, and we’re not really mechanics,” Chuck said.

“That’s beside the point. Demonic. Demonic, I tell you.”

“Uh-huh,” Sarah said when Morgan looked at her for confirmation. “Demonic indeed. Clearly, possessed by...evil things.”

Morgan nodded in approval. Sarah hid her smile with the mug of cocoa Chuck passed over to her as he sat down.

Violet took a long slurp from her mug. “What’s demonic mean?”

“Evil,” Morgan said. “Vicious.”

“Like Sir?”

“Yeah,” Chuck said as Sarah nearly choked on the cocoa, trying to hide her surprised laughter. “Just like Sir.”

“I’m gonna go tell him!” Violet sprang off of Sarah’s lap so quickly that the spy winced; Chuck’s daughter really was all one sharp angle.

“Wait, was she talking about the dog or the robot? Because if it’s the latter, we might need to run.”

“We’ll find out soon enough,” Chuck said, and Sarah noticed that all three of them were tensed now, ready to run for the hills if need be. “Ellie, you willing to hold him off so we can get away?”

The brunette looked up from her magazine. “You got yourself into this mess on your own, Chuck.”

“God have mercy on my soul,” Chuck said. They sipped their hot chocolate, falling quiet, waiting. “You know, I think we may be in the—”

“Bartowski!”

“Clear. Run,” Chuck said, and he, Sarah, and Morgan wasted no time abandoning the kitchen and racing away to safer parts of the house.


	5. First Down

“Okay, that’s it.” 

Ellie’s voice cut through the kitchen, breaking up what could have been a potential bout of fisticuffs over a dice roll in Candy Land. Chuck, who had his hands over Violet’s ears to at least filter out _some_ of Casey’s profanity at not getting the color he wanted, looked over at his sister in surprise. He recognized the tone. Hurricane Ellie was about to blow through and lay waste to everything in her path.

“What’s up, babe?” Awesome asked, speaking for all of them at the table.

“We’re getting out of here.”

“We’ve been in the cabin less than twenty-four hours,” Chuck said. He realized that he was still holding Violet’s ears, so he lowered his hands and put them back on his computer keyboard. He wasn’t playing Candy Land, as he had his laptop open and was fiddling with a bit of code, but it seemed prudent to be around to referee, and he wanted to give Sarah some space to hunt for any bugs that the government might have planted without their knowledge. 

Of course, if there were bugs outside, after that little snow make-out, they were probably screwed. He was trying not to think about it, and by not thinking about it, he was only thinking about it more. As a result, he felt jumpy and needy and vaguely embarrassed to be around so many people. That was why he had the computer.

Ellie pointed at Casey and Morgan. “Those two are arguing already, and that is not a good sign, Chuck. Not a good sign. So tonight we’re going into Carson City and going to a casino, like actual adults.”

“Except for Violet, who is, in fact, a small child,” Morgan said.

“Yes, thank you, Morgan, we’re aware of that,” Ellie said.

“But I’m gonna be an adult soon,” Violet said in a whisper to Morgan.

He patted her on the head and she glowered.

“We can’t all go, somebody’s got to stay with Byt—I mean, Megabyte,” Chuck said.

“I can stay by myself,” Violet said. “I’m almost twelve.”

“Nice try,” Ellie, Chuck, and Awesome said together, and Violet pouted a little.

“We’ll draw straws to see who gets to hang out with Violet tonight,” Ellie said. “But this is mandatory adult night. We’re not going to be shut-ins for this entire trip.”

From the doorway, he heard Sarah’s chuckle. She leaned against the doorjamb wearing a blue sweater with white snowflakes on the front and fuzzy purple socks. “Chuck and I don’t mind staying here so the rest of you can go out, have a good time.”

She gave Chuck a significant look, and he realized that the cabin must be bug-free after all. His heart-rate picked up quite a bit. 

“Yeah,” he said. “We don’t mind at all. That’s cool.”

“Nope,” Ellie said. “You two get plenty of alone time in L.A., you can suffer through one night of going out and being adults with social lives. So we’re drawing straws and we’re going to be adults, got it?”

“I really don’t mind,” Chuck said. “Really.”

“Nope,” Ellie said again. She pulled toothpicks out of the drawer and broke one in half, holding out a handful. Reluctantly, Chuck sighed and selected his toothpick—a long one. He was going to the casinos tonight, apparently.

“Okay,” Ellie said, “now that Morgan’s got the short straw—”

“No, I don’t,” Morgan said.

“I do.” Sarah held up the broken toothpick.

Ellie stared at it. “Drat,” she said. “I thought I’d rigged that better.”

“I’m so happy about losing all of Chuck’s money at the casino that I’m not even going to take offense to the fact that you wanted to leave me behind, Eleanor,” Morgan said.

“I don’t know, I think I might take offense to that,” Chuck said, frowning at his sister. 

“Does that mean it’s just going to be you and me tonight, Sarah?” Violet asked.

“Looks like. Chuck, you got a moment?”

“We’re going to discuss this trying to leave Morgan behind thing,” Chuck said, pointing at Ellie as he climbed to his feet. He closed his laptop.

“Can’t wait,” she said, and because she turned away, he had to figure she was rolling her eyes.

He did the mature thing and stuck his tongue out at his sister as he followed Sarah out of the kitchen. After the door closed behind him, he said, “What did you want to talk about—oof.”

He didn’t know if it was some spy trick to grab belt loops and yank, but it definitely caught him off-balance. He stumbled forward into the little hallway between the living room and the downstairs washroom, bumping right into Sarah so that they kind of crashed into the wall together. His entire system kicked immediately into overdrive, which only intensified when she kissed him. It took him a second to adjust from playing a board game with his family to being pressed up against Sarah in the hall with her lips on his, but thankfully, he’d always been a quick study. He kissed her back, the hand that had been planted against the wall sliding into her hair so that his fingers teased her neck.

“No bugs, I’m guessing?” he asked, pulling back just a fraction.

Sarah gave him a less-than-patient look.

For some reason, it only made him grin. “Or are there bugs and we’re both risking treason? Because I won’t lie, right now I find that incredibly hot.”

“We should get your head checked.”

“It’s full. There’s an Intersect in there and everything.”

Sarah made a strangled noise that almost sounded like a laugh. She unhooked her fingers from his belt loops and grabbed his face instead, her fingers digging in insistently as she hauled him down for another kiss. Just like that, Chuck found their positions reversed as Sarah backed him into the opposite wall. His shoulder blades bumped into what he was pretty sure was a painting of ducks or something, and any thoughts of teasing her about her urgency promptly abandoned him. So did most of his thoughts, actually.

If anything, really, he was just as urgent, his hands roaming all over her body or fisting in her hair as they kissed. Two months of secret looks, stolen kisses, and clandestine touching. Of the frustration of having everything he could possibly want _right there_ within reach—hell, usually in bed next to him because appearances had to be kept up—and held back from him by red tape and orders and the thing in his head. When Sarah moaned, he wanted to do exactly the same. He dragged his fingertips along the strip of her skin where her sweater and jeans met as he kissed his way down her neck. Her little shudder in reply made him smile against her skin.

Sadly, though, she leaned back and hooked her arms around his neck. She was breathing just as hard as he was. “I’ve been wanting to do that all day.”

The look on his face was probably entering dopey territory. He didn’t really care. “You realize I’m never going to be able to concentrate if I know you’re thinking about this kind of thing, right?”

“Maybe that’s why I told you in the first place.” She tilted her chin up to give him a dainty kiss on the corner of his mouth. “All part of my evil plan.”

“Oh, god, that’s pure torture,” Chuck said. He leaned his head back against the portrait and closed his eyes, which was really his way of trying to gain more self-control. If he looked at Sarah, just stood there and looked at her, he was going to forget again that on the other side of the wall were five very sarcastic and mouthy people, one of whom would be scarred for life if she witnessed this little tableau. He could actually feel his heart pounding in his ears, which made him smile a little. “Hopefully we’ll at least be able to give my concentration a proper burial, since knowing that, it’s really not long for this earth.”

“I’ve got a few ideas,” Sarah said. She kissed him slowly this time, deliberately, her tongue teasing his so that he was the one groaning.

No, wait, that sounded more like a grunt. And it wasn’t coming from him.

Chuck froze. He felt something suspiciously like a chuckle coming from Sarah’s midsection before they broke the kiss. “Can I help you, Major?” she asked.

If he didn’t open his eyes, then maybe this wasn’t happening, Chuck decided. But “Oh, crap!” seemed to fit the situation.

There was another grunt, this time even more annoyed, and Chuck finally ceded to the inevitable. He opened his eyes to see Casey standing at the edge of the hallway, looking like somebody had scratched his beloved Crown Victoria. His massive arms were folded across his equally massive chest. “Are you trying to eat the Asset’s face, Walker? There are easier ways to kill him than giving him cardiac arrest by taking off your shirt.”

Chuck’s eyes crossed briefly at the vision. “What a way to die. Ow, no hair-pulling.”

Sarah gave him a briefly contrite look before she turned her glower on Casey. “I am going to ignore your comment about my killer abs, Casey—”

“Did you just make a pun?” Chuck asked, gaping.

Sarah sighed. “Did you need something?” she asked Casey.

“I thought,” Casey said, glaring hard enough that Chuck reluctantly dropped his hands to his sides (Sarah did not relinquish her hold on his neck), “you two had stepped out to discuss security detail for this evening, but given the…sexual deviancy in this hallway, I’m assuming you’ve swept the cabin for bugs.”

“Yup,” Sarah said. 

“Walker, for Patton’s sake, unhand the nerd.”

Sarah raised her eyebrow and for a moment, Chuck actually worried that it might come to blows. But she let him go and crossed her arms over her chest, mirroring Casey’s stance. “Did you want something, Casey?”

“Look, I got nothing against you two knocking boots, but do me a favor and keep it behind locked doors. Walker, you’ve got the midget tonight?”

“Is midget really an appropriate term here?” Chuck asked.

The spies ignored him. “Yes,” Sarah said to Casey.

Casey’s silence made Chuck squint at him suspiciously, but eventually the NSA officer nodded. “Good job rigging the toothpicks.”

“Why, thank you, Casey. I was not expecting to hear a compliment from you.” Sarah broke off with a puzzled frown. “Ever. I don’t think you’ll have to worry about security detail too much tonight. Though you might want to stay out of the cabin.”

“I did not want or need to know that,” Casey said, rubbing a hand down his face. He pointed at Chuck. “If you leave me stranded with the gnome, you will owe me one, do you understand me? And I wasn’t kidding about the locked doors.”

He stomped away.

“Wh-what is he talking about?” Chuck asked. “Stranding him with the gn—oh, he’s talking about Morgan. You know, people around here really need to start respecting the man with the beard.”

“He’s a good man to have on your side in a snowball fight,” Sarah said. She pushed her hands through her hair and finally gave him an almost shy smile. “Hi. Sorry for the—you know, attacking you.”

“Uh, no, really, it was my pleasure.” And truthfully, he was counting the seconds until it could happen again, but if the universe had created a better buzzkill than John Casey’s glare, Chuck had yet to see it. So he stuffed his hands in his pockets and gave her one of her dopiest smiles in return. “What’s Casey talking about?”

“Probably about how you’re going to hang around for twenty minutes at the casinos before you get a text from me that Violet’s not handling being away from home without her daddy,” Sarah said, shrugging. “I figure that’s an excuse Ellie will find acceptable.”

Chuck felt the ambient temperature in the room rise a couple dozen degrees. “Miss Walker, you’re trying to seduce me,” he said.

“Well, yes.” She raised her eyebrow at him and leaned against the opposite wall. Chuck’s mind went a little blurry at the thought, but apparently Casey’s glare-as-buzzkill was still in effect for her, too. Neither of them made a move toward the other. “But more importantly, we don’t really want you running loose in a casino. With the sort that you find in these places, there’s a higher risk you’ll flash on something.”

He blinked a couple of times. “Oh. Huh, I didn’t think of that.”

“And if you do, we’re honor-bound to at least investigate, and we don’t have the structural support up here, plus there’s a heightened risk of your sister and the others finding us out.”

It _was_ true that he tended to flash in public places, which had led to some pretty zany adventures over the past few months. But he hadn’t realized that Casey and Sarah might find that just as annoying as he did. “Huh,” he said again. “Does that mean I get a week of staying at the cabin and hanging out with you?”

“I’ll make it worth your while,” Sarah said, and Chuck was busy coughing when the kitchen door opened and a small face peeked around the corner. 

“Hi,” Vi said. “Uncle Awesome wants to know if you’re taking Major Casey Sir’s place in Candy Land, Sarah. Or you, too, Daddy.”

“Or are they too _biz-zay_?” Morgan sing-songed from the kitchen.

“Morgan!” Ellie, Awesome, and Chuck said together.

Sarah ran the tips of her fingers down Chuck’s arm, giving him one last smile before she dove at Vi, making the girl giggle. “Is Major Casey Sir in the lead?”

“He’s in last place.” Vi dodged out of the way, shrieking a little. Her grin was positively sunny as she leaned forward and whispered, “I think that’s why he left.”

“Casey? A poor sport? Imagine that,” Chuck said, and all three of them looked over as the man’s namesake suddenly rolled over, one ear flopping dramatically over his head. Sir regarded his three humans—for there could be no denying that that’s what they were, with Sarah taking him for his morning run, Vi being _his_ human, and Chuck being the schlub that took care of everything else—with a cocked head for a moment. And then, like an elephant slowly lumbering to its feet, he rose and padded over, straight to Chuck. He rested one massive paw on Chuck’s knee.

“Your turn,” Sarah said, as that was Sir’s symbol for ‛It’s time to commune with nature now, please.’ 

Chuck groaned. His stuff was still mostly wet from the snowball fight earlier, but there was no turning down the two smiles aimed at him. “Oh, all right,” he said to the dog. “But you owe me one, buster.”

Sir gave him a doggy grin and raced for the mudroom.

* * *

Chuck and Morgan had gone to Vegas once, just after their twenty-first birthdays, while Chuck was on a break from Stanford and Morgan still had his old rattletrap car that had ultimately wheezed its last, obnoxious wheeze on the Mojave Freeway outside of Victorville. He remembered thinking it was dingy and kind of dark, permanently trapped in amber like some dinosaur from the sixties and seventies.

The Carson City Nugget casino was worse.

“Ellie wanted us to go here why?” Morgan asked, frowning as he adjusted his jacket.

“Well, technically, Ellie wanted you to stay home with Vi,” Chuck said. He’d had words with his sister about that, about how Morgan was basically a part of the family now as Violet’s uncle and how the sabotage was really uncool. Ellie had just given him a Look.

“I think I’d prefer to stay home, almost,” Morgan said, side-stepping a man in a cowboy hat and honest to god leather chaps (thankfully he had jeans on under them). 

Chuck thought of Sarah and the particularly searing look she’d given him before he had been bundled out the door with the others. “Me too.”

Casey’s grunt essentially translated to: “Ditto.”

The three men stood by the entrance to the casino together, hands shoved in their pockets. Chuck was deliberately not looking at any faces, as in precisely thirteen minutes, he was going to receive a text message from Sarah with news that Vi wasn’t handling Tahoe well with just Sarah around, and Chuck’s presence was needed immediately. And a mission was _not_ going to get in the way of that, not if Charles Irving Bartowski had anything to say about it.

A glance at Casey’s face told him that maybe he had bigger things to worry about than a mission, though. It looked like absolutely nothing that would prevent Casey from tagging along if Chuck decided to make his excuses and leave early. And it was going to be hard enough to get some alone time after Vi went to sleep. Adding a gigantic dog and a curmudgeonly NSA agent seemed like a recipe for catastrophe. Morgan would probably tag along, too, come to think of it.

This was not happening.

Abruptly, Chuck straightened up, a new plan in mind. Casey first, he decided. 

“Sweet, poker,” he said, trying to look enthusiastic. Casey would pride himself on being able to read people or intimidate them out of their money. “Care to make a side-bet, Case? Twenty says I can make more than you.”

Casey snorted. “My job matters too much to allow you to make sucker bets.”

“Uh, what?” Morgan asked.

“You know what? I’ll go get us some beers,” Chuck said. “First round’s on me. Meet you over at the table?”

He split from Casey, heading for the bar, but Morgan chose to trail after him, hands still in his pockets. He had one of those patterned caps with the flaps on, even though the casino was almost overly warm. “That dude is weird,” he said once Chuck had placed an order for Casey’s favorite brand of beer. “Are we really sure he’s actually related to Sarah? Something definitely went either incredibly wrong or incredibly right in that gene pool.”

“Hey,” Chuck said.

“I have eyes, Chuck. Do you expect me to deny that the woman is the hottest thing since Zatanna?”

“It’s the principle of the thing.” Chuck handed over cash for the beers and pushed one to his friend. For a moment, though, neither of them left the bar. Casey had somehow managed to find a table that was full-up, which meant no room for Chuck or Morgan, and Chuck didn’t really mind. 

One problem down, he thought as he dropped the beer off at Casey’s elbow. The size of the pot in the middle of the table made him wince.

“Where to now?” he asked Morgan, and winced when he saw the look on Morgan’s face. He recognized that bright-eyed shine of adoration.

“You know it calls to me,” Morgan said, already lurching in the direction of the roulette tables. It wasn’t Chuck’s game—he didn’t have anything against it, per se, but he always bet on black because of Wesley Snipes and Wesley Snipes had let him and the IRS down a few too many times for comfort. “I can hear its sweet symphony, humming my name. Morgan Guillermo Grimes, Morgan Guillermo Grimes.”

Chuck clapped his best friend on the shoulder. “Then you should answer that call, my good fellow. Though, uh, keep it under fifty, maybe?”

“And always—” Morgan said.

“—Bet on black,” Chuck finished with him. “Go with God, my son.”

Morgan folded his hands in front of him in a steeple and gave him a short bow. “Aye, my good man. Aye.”

“That was surprisingly easy,” Chuck said aloud as Morgan bounced away. He immediately cringed. He could practically feel the weight of the words in the air, tempting fate. But when nothing happened for a full minute, he checked his phone—no text from Sarah yet—and with a shrug, headed to the rows of slot machines. He had a few quarters in his pocket and some time to kill and Vi’s college fund wasn’t going to grow itself, after all. 

Ten minutes later and five dollars richer, he sat back and pulled out his phone again.

And right on time, there it was.

“Excellent,” Chuck said. Now he had to find Ellie and make his excuses to her, and he could head home to his incredibly tired child and Sarah. A glance at the poker tables told him Casey was up two hundred dollars and wouldn’t want to leave. He’d planned this all incredibly well. 

Chuck slipped one last quarter into the machine and grinned when the flashing pears promptly handed him twenty dollars in quarters as somebody sat at the slot machine next to his.

And then he heard a feminine clearing of the throat and his entire world froze. 

As if confirming his worst fears, the woman followed it up with, “Chuck?”

Chuck turned. “What are you doing here?”


	6. Touchdown

A soft chirp made Sarah look away from the laptop screen and blink at the clock on the room’s dresser. She hadn’t been _that_ absorbed in watching surveillance of the government workers at Chuck’s house that she’d completely let time slip away, had she? Apparently she had. She shut the laptop lid and set it on the nightstand, swearing under her breath when she spotted the taxi through the window. She’d meant to prepare, but it would have to do for now.

Carefully, she stepped around the bed and scooped up the sleeping five-year-old that had been sprawled over the other side of the mattress. Violet barely even stirred, though Sir raised his head in question from his position over the heating grill.

“Trust me,” Sarah told the dog as she nudged the door open with her shoulder, Violet’s arms swaying limply, “you don’t want to stick around for what happens next. Move it.”

Sir whuffed, the tragedy in his canine eyes painting a picture of sheer indignity about being forced to endure the sheer indignity of leaving the warm spot behind. And then he rolled to his giant paws and nipped playfully at Violet’s dangling foot. 

“Quit that,” Sarah said. Because it was her and not Chuck, Sir stopped. He flopped into a lazy, groaning pile of bones and fur next to the couch as Sarah laid the still-sleeping Violet down. She covered the girl with a blanket—which did little good, as Violet rolled over, kicking most of the blanket off. Sir rested his giant head against the arm that dangled over the side of the couch.

“Well, as long as you two are happy,” Sarah said, and both girl and dog sighed in their sleep.

At the sound of footsteps on the walk, she moved over to the door, smirking. Her blood wasn’t quite humming, but she couldn’t deny the excitement building behind her sternum. When the door opened, she pounced. Chuck had time for one muffled grunt of surprise (and a tiny flailing motion) before she pushed him back against the door to close it, locking her mouth to his so intensely that they were both gasping when they broke apart.

Chuck’s lips, already chapped from the cold, split wide in a grin. “Were you waiting at—”

“Shh.” Sarah jerked her head at the couch, the sleeping child, and the vaguely interested dog.

“Sorry.” He lowered his voice, his hands working up the back of her shirt—which almost made her flinch, as his fingers felt like icicles. “Were you waiting at the door specifically to greet me like that?”

She unzipped his parka and ran her hands along his sides, moving closer as she kissed him. “What do you think?”

“Honestly? What if it had been Casey? Ow.”

She’d only pinched him a little. Sarah debated her options and decided to go with the direct route, which was to gently bite his ear lobe. His breathing went shallow. “Do you,” she said, peppering kisses from his ear to his throat as she pushed the parka off of his shoulders, “really want to think about Casey right at this moment?”

He dropped the parka and grabbed her, almost crushing her as he kissed her. “Not particularly. But we do need to get out of the room with the small child in it. Now. Right now.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Sarah said. She should have been proud about making Chuck sound that strained, if she weren’t feeling exactly the same way, all itchy and like the top of her head might come shooting off. It had been a _long_ three months after that kiss on New Year’s Eve. 

“One sec.” Chuck took a deep, shuddering breath when she stepped back. “I can’t even begin to tell you how happy it makes me to hear you say that,” he said, scooping up the parka and opening the front closet to stow it inside. “How’d Vi do?”

“Lasted twenty minutes and then out like a light.” She’d let Violet crash on the bed with her while she’d gotten some work done. It had just seemed more human than leaving Violet on the couch, which was ridiculous because Sarah had actually seen the girl fall asleep sitting upright at the dining room table. “Been out an hour or so. I think she missed you.”

“Aw.” Chuck glanced over the back of the couch and gave Sir a look. “What are you looking at, creep? None of your business what’s going on here.”

“Speaking of that.” Sarah grabbed his hand to pull him down the hallway. “I believe you’re late for an appointment.”

“A sex appointment.” Chuck wiggled his eyebrows, and frowned. “Wow, that sounded less lame in my head. A sex appointment? It sounds like a prostitution thing. Not cool. Unless you’re into that.”

Sarah shut the bedroom door. “Not into that.”

“Right, yeah. What _are_ you into? Just so I can, uh, plan ahead.”

Because she remembered Christmas morning all too well, Sarah locked the door. “I don’t have too many outrageous kinks,” she said, tugging on Chuck’s hand to pull him toward her. “Mostly what I’m into is you.”

Again, that heart-melting grin spread. She decided it should probably be registered as a lethal weapon, but they could get to that later.

“Oh, really,” Chuck said. He stepped closer, right into her space, and grabbed her waist, kissing her slowly. “Still, wouldn’t you like some candles or wine or something?”

“What I want for you is to take off the sweater.”

“So you can admire yourself some nerd physique? I conditioned this body myself, you know. Countless hours of _World of Warcraft_ with a steady diet of Cheetohs and pizza to supplement it. The perfect nerd.”

Sarah nearly snorted. Like she hadn’t admired his rangy build, the surprisingly broad shoulders and the narrow hips, before. “That, and it just makes it easier to run my tongue all over your body,” she said, and she had the pleasure of seeing his eyes nearly cross.

He got out of the sweater very, very quickly.

“Yeah, I thought so,” Sarah said, chuckling a little when he kissed her again. The kiss deepened until they were both pawing at various articles of clothing, laughing and swearing under their breath when urgency made them clumsy. Or, Sarah thought, like horny teenagers finally away from adult supervision. The thought actually sent a thrill through her, one that was embarrassingly strong. She would never have done anything like this as a teenager. Chuck might have, though probably not like this.

It made her laugh again.

Chuck immediately lifted his head. “What? What is it?”

“Oh, nothing. Just…feels a bit like being a teenager, you know?”

“This is way better than trying to get to first base after chem lab.” Chuck fiddled with her bra strap. His hair was already mussed from her hands and his face was flushed, but that grin was still there. “In fact, nothing from my teenage years even comes close to this moment.”

“Ditto,” she said, and peeled out of her jeans. 

“Way, way better than high school,” he said, pulling her close once again. “High school me wouldn’t have had a chance with you.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” She let her hands roam because they could, and she enjoyed the catch in Chuck’s breath. “I think I definitely would have looked twice. At you.” 

“Aw, shucks.” When he kissed her again, the kiss deepened until they were wrapped around each other, hands wandering—until Chuck shifted and they were on the bed in a move so smooth, Sarah hadn’t seen it coming. She let out a gasp.

“Like that, huh?” His voice was low as he moved his lips down her neck to her collarbone, thumbs tracing light circles on her hipbones. 

She didn’t quite manage to keep her voice steady. “It’s all right. I guess.”

He rested his chin against her stomach, a wide smirk on his face. His thumbs never ceased. She wanted his hands all over her like that, she decided. Hell, her body was already beginning to quiver a little bit in anticipation of it. He had calluses from the game controllers he typically held, and why that was suddenly driving her nuts, she didn’t know. But she certainly wasn’t going to question any of it. “You guess?” he asked. “I got moves, you know.”

Without breaking eye-contact, he pressed a single kiss to her midriff, and Sarah figured she was done for.

“Oh yeah?” She reached behind her and popped the clasp to her bra open. “Well, why don’t you show me, then?”

Chuck, it seemed, was all too happy to oblige.

* * *

“I might be blind. No, I’m not blind. I clearly saw choirs of angels and they were singing your name.” Chuck moved his head and nuzzled the side of her neck with his nose.

Sarah had her eyes closed, but she smiled anyway. “Pretty sure that was you.”

“You didn’t see the angels?”

Sarah opened her eyes and met his straight on. They were lying where they’d fallen, sweaty and wiped out, and Chuck’s face was only a couple of inches from hers, though she did have to look at him kind of cross-eyed. “No,” she said. “I can’t say I did.”

His grin took on an edge of dopiness. “They all looked like you.”

“Oh my god.” Sarah rolled away from him, mostly because she could feel the traitorous giggle bubbling up. “Seriously?”

“What?” Chuck affected an innocent look as he rested his head on her shoulder. 

“That was smooth. Corny as hell, but smooth.”

“Special brand of Bartowski magic. It’s a curse, I tell you. An absolute curse.” Chuck let out a gusty, world-weary sigh. “Just like my devilish good looks and incredible wit.”

Sarah squinted. “Such a burden.”

“The biggest.”

Sarah propped herself on her elbows and then rolled over until she was on top of him, arms crossed over his chest. She rested her chin on her wrists. “However do you bear it?”

“Up until this week I had constant surveillance and paranoia to keep me humble. But now that I know you are truly warm for this form—”

“Really?” Sarah asked, raising an eyebrow.

“You pushed me up against a wall. Twice. It’s incredibly flattering and not a little intimidating, you know.”

Sarah, about to kiss him, paused. Her stomach sank a little. “Intimidating.”

“And hot.” Chuck reached up to thread his fingers in her hair, which she was sure had to be a mess. She really didn’t care. “I’m having a hard time convincing myself this is real, you know. I know it is, but I can’t believe it. You’re here, I’m here, you’re perfect.”

“You’re not too bad yourself.”

“Please, I’m fantastic.”

Sarah finally laughed. “Yes,” she said, kissing him, “you are.” She felt Chuck’s hand in her hair spasm, like he was surprised, but she chose to ignore that and instead focused on the way his lips felt against hers, which really had the power to drive her absolutely wild. 

It was such a novel sensation. She definitely wasn’t getting used to this anytime soon.

He broke the kiss. “Water,” he said in a croaky voice. “As excellent as this, I need it. I crave it.”

“Oh, fine.” She rested her head back against the pillow and tried to catch her breath a little as he crawled out of bed and headed for the dresser. “Get me some, too?”

“Your wish, my command. And it’s really weird that you’re checking out my ass right now.”

“That’s not all I’m checking out.”

“So weird.” Chuck pulled on pajama pants and slung a T-shirt across his shoulder. He pointed to her as he headed for the bathroom to clean up. “Don’t go anywhere. I won’t be able to convince myself it wasn’t a dream.”

“So you’re saying don’t escape through the window?”

“Sad as it is to say, you wouldn’t be the first to try it after intercourse with me.” Chuck poked his head out to flash her a cheeky grin.

She propped her hand on her hand and thought that over. Of course, it sounded absurd, but some of the stories Chuck had told her before... “Is that even true?”

He only laughed as he left the room. 

The minute she was alone, Sarah flopped back onto her back and drew in a deep breath, steadying herself. She had not expected _that_. Certainly, she’d had daydreams before—a lot of them, if she was going to be completely honest; it turned out living under strict surveillance flipped on some contrary switch inside her—but nothing of this magnitude. She gave herself sixty seconds to do nothing but relax, and then regretfully rolled out of bed, padding over to the dresser.

Chuck pouted when he came back inside and found her pulling on one of his T-shirts. “Aw.”

“You want to be the one to scar your daughter for life, or me?”

“Point, but—oh my god.”

Sarah instinctively reached for the small of her back and the gun that wasn’t there. “What? What is it?”

“It completely slipped my mind—Sophie. Sophie’s in Tahoe.”

Sarah dropped her hand to her side. “What?”

“She approached me at the casino, right before I left.” Chuck set down one of the water glasses to push his hand through his hair. He sat down on the edge of the bed. “I wasn’t expecting it, and she wasn’t expecting it, either, actually. We just sort of ran into each other. I was going to tell you earlier.”

“And you didn’t because—”

“You attacked me,” Chuck said, and she couldn’t resist the urge to roll her eyes a little at his terminology, especially when he gave her a skeptical look. “I really was going to tell you.”

“I’m not mad,” Sarah said, shaking her head as her thoughts settled. She wasn’t proud that her first instinct had been annoyance at something ruining their perfect vacation, but with the aggravation out of the way, other questions arose. “Just surprised. Why is she here?”

“Wants to see Vi. I mean, technically it’s her weekend.”

“Really? That’s a surprise.”

Chuck squinted at her.

“What?” Sarah said. “It is. She hasn’t exactly made overtures to visit like this before.”

“Are you thinking this feels like some kind of set-up? I mean, she’s an actress, not a spy.”

Sarah had to blink a few times. When _had_ she started thinking of Sophie like a spy? The woman did use counter-surveillance tactics, but...was she really so far out of the field that she was losing focus? It made an uneasy feeling crawl along the back of her spine, so she reached for the water glass in Chuck’s hand and downed half of its contents. “No, I’m just thinking like a spy. Ignore me. Did you tell Casey?”

“I told him right afterward, and he thought I should get out of there. I, um, convinced him to stick around with Morgan and the others. Make sure, you know, nobody caught Sophie and me talking together on camera or anything. But the good news is he backed me up when you texted me so nobody else wanted to ruin our sex-appointment.”

Sarah groaned and rested her forehead against his shoulder. “We’re not calling it that.”

“I don’t know.” He played with her hair again. She was starting to think he was getting an obsession with it. “I kind of like it.”

“You compared it to prostitution earlier.”

“I don’t recall any transactions other than, you know, bodily fluids.” Chuck wrinkled his nose before she could. “Never mind that. I told Sophie that if she wanted to come up to the cabin tomorrow, Vi likes the snow.”

“Should be remote enough to keep any paparazzi away. It’s a good idea.”

“Yeah, and Ellie and Awesome are going skiing tomorrow, so they can find out afterward.”

Sarah gave him a surprised look. “Keeping more secrets from your sister?”

He scrunched his face up. “Sophie and Ellie don’t exactly get along?” It sounded almost like a question. “Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s not exactly noble. Coward’s way out completely, I admit it. I just thought it’s better to keep the hostile parties away from each other.”

“And you’re bringing me into your little scheme.” Sarah couldn’t stop the little smirk. She bumped her shoulder against Chuck’s and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Violet will be happy. To see her mom.”

“And Ellie can hear about it afterward and everything will be okay,” Chuck said. “Sorry about not bringing it up sooner.”

“We were a little busy.” Sarah held her thumb and forefinger up close together, which made Chuck grin. “Vi still sleeping?”

“How she can sleep with Sir basically using her hand for a pillow is beyond me. His head’s like a boulder.” They both looked up when the monitor chirped, indicating that another car was pulling in. “What’s that?”

“Alert system.” Sarah got up and moved over to the window to check. The vehicle in the driveway made her blink, but she quickly backed away from blinds before she could get caught spying. “The others are back. That was sooner than I expected. Think there was a problem?”

Chuck flopped backward onto the mattress. “If there is,” he said, closing his eyes with his arms spread wide, “I vote we hear about it at breakfast and not now. If we eat breakfast. Eating breakfast means leaving the bed, and I vote we never do that. Leave the bed, that is. Granted, first you have to get into the bed for us to never leave it.”

Sarah nibbled on her bottom lip. “I should probably talk to Casey.”

“He’s gonna know you just had sex.”

“And tomorrow is soon enough to talk to Casey, you’re right,” Sarah said without missing a beat. She set the water glass down on the nightstand and crawled back into bed, kicking around some of the covers they’d mussed. When Chuck stretched his arm out toward her, she wasted no time pressing in against the warmth of his side, finally giving into some of the exhaustion from their long day playing in the snow (and trying to keep their hands off of each other).

He winced a little when she pushed her feet—which had been frozen ever since they’d arrived, really—between his. “Heh,” he said.

“What?”

“Should’ve expected you’re an aggressive cuddler.”

“I am not.” She half-lifted her head in mock-outrage.

“And your feet are like popsicles with toes attached.”

Sarah snorted at the imagery and settled in, not caring that she was proving Chuck’s point about the aggressive cuddling. “Then do your job and warm them up,” she said.

“So this is how it’s going to be? I’m your errand boy and foot warmer.”

“Among other things,” Sarah said, shifting around so that she could get a little closer to his warmth. “I’ll let you know as they come along.”

“Deal,” Chuck said.


	7. Interception

When Sarah emerged from her shower the next morning, rubbing at the ends of her hair, she saw Violet sitting on her side of the bed, reenacting some kind of battle scene with Chewbacca (the teddy bear, not the dog) and Strawberry Shortcake. From the _pew-pew-pew_ , it sounded like Sergeant Shortcake was pinned down by enemy fire and there wasn’t a hope for rescue.

All chances of ex-fil were forgotten when Violet looked up and spotted her. “Sarah!”

Sarah put a finger to her lips and jerked her head at the still-sleeping Chuck. Violet slapped a hand over her mouth. “C’mon,” Sarah said, and they crept out of the room. Strawberry Shortcake came along, but Chewbacca was left behind.

Chuck was probably going to be very confused when he woke up and found a toy in Sarah’s place.

“I’m hungry,” Violet said, dragging a chair over to the counter while Sarah rooted through the cabinets, familiarizing herself with the kitchen. “I’d ask Uncle Morgan for waffles, but he’s still sleeping and he likes sleep more than he likes waffles. He told me so. Can you make pancakes?”

“Can I make pancakes? What kind of a question is that?”

“With strawberries, like my doll?”

“I thought you liked blueberries this week.” Sarah poked through the fridge. Apparently Ellie had done quite a bit of shopping for the week. She hoped that the strawberries in the crisper weren’t for anything particular.

“Her name’s _Strawberry_ Shortcake, not Blueberry...”

“Bundt-Cake?” Sarah guessed when Violet’s face scrunched up in confusion.

“Blueberry Bundt-Cake? Is that real?”

“Probably not. But never fear, we’ve got strawberries. Now, let me just find the rest of the ingredients.”

“Can I chop up the strawberries?”

“Why don’t you wash them off instead?” Violet would probably splash water all over the place, but at least she was still in her pajamas. “Where’s that dog of yours, huh?”

“Major Casey Sir took him for a run.” Violet poked the tip of her tongue out as she concentrated on running water over the plastic container. “Sir was really, really happy about it.”

And Casey probably wasn’t, Sarah thought. It was easy to maneuver around the girl standing on her chair as they’d done this before multiple times back in Burbank. She had Violet set the table while she flipped pancakes and prepped the rest of the food. The aroma would wake Morgan up, no doubt, and Chuck wouldn’t be far behind. Ellie and Devon had made plans to hit the slopes early, so they wouldn’t be back until dinner. Morgan had plans to spend the day at the local Buy More—which was the only reason he’d gotten the full week off—so it would just be Violet, Chuck, and the spies.

And Sophie.

Casey and Sir returned just as Sarah set the platter of pancakes on the table. “No sign of trouble,” Casey said. “Everything should be okay for later. Wait—did you cook?”

“Why are you always surprised when I do that?”

“Little girly for you, don’t you think?”

“Don’t be a dou—ble un-fun person,” Sarah said, remembering the little ears wandering around the kitchen, singing nonsense songs to the dog. “Go wash up. We’re all eating breakfast together.”

“Kill me now.”

Violet looked up from squishing Sir’s face. “Aunt Ellie tells me that I shouldn’t forget to scrub behind my ears when I take a bath.”

Since Casey’s scowl deepened to frightening levels, Sarah put an arm around the girl and gave him her biggest grin. “That’s exactly right. Don’t forget to scrub behind your ears, Casey.”

He grumbled wordlessly as he stomped out of the kitchen. Violet scooted into her seat at the table. “How come you don’t call him John if he’s your brother?”

“Because he likes being called Casey.”

“And Major Casey Sir?”

“He _loves_ that.”

“Awesome!”

Chuck stumbled in, definitely a little more rumpled than usual. “What’s awesome?” he asked. He gave Violet a one-armed noogie/hug. “Morning, Megabyte.”

“Major Casey Sir is awesome,” Violet said. “Sarah doesn’t call him John because he prefers Casey, but he likes Major Casey Sir even better. Do you think it’s because he shares his name with Sir?”

“Of course it is,” Chuck said. “Hey, Megabyte, look at the wall or something, will you? I’m going to kiss Sarah good morning.”

Obligingly, she covered her eyes with her hands. “Kissing kind of looks gross.”

“Yeah, yeah, save it for the peanut gallery. Hi.” Chuck stepped around the chair and pulled her close, and though she normally didn’t really find smugness all that attractive, a little curl of sheer lust made its presence known. It only intensified when Chuck kissed her, taking his time. She bunched her hand in his shirt.

“Hey, guys, what’s—oh, gross. Is this going to be a regular thing now?”

“Uncle Morgan!”

Chuck lifted his head to glare at his best friend while Sarah chuckled and rested her forehead against his shoulder. “Thanks. Thanks so much.”

“If you two are going to be all gross and public displays of affection, I’m gonna have to rescue the Megabyte. Who knows what these G-rated eyes will see?” Morgan snatched the giggling Violet up and tossed her over his shoulder, spinning around.

Sarah eyed the wall. That was cutting it rather close.

“Uncle Morgan! Sarah made pancakes!”

“You two kept your lips off of each other long enough for her to do that?” Morgan asked.

“Well, considering I just woke up...”

“I’m sorry, did you not want pancakes?” Sarah asked, raising an eyebrow at Morgan.

“I don’t know, I’m protecting the impressionable youth here. Are they—ooh, strawberries, sign me up.” Morgan stopped spinning long enough to head for the table—where he promptly ran into Casey, who’d just entered the kitchen. Morgan wobbled backward and nearly tripped over Sir, who had nosed over because all of the activity had intrigued him more than the potential of food. Sarah saw catastrophe happening in slow motion.

Until Casey plucked up the child with one hand and grabbed the nerd with the other. He grunted as he tossed Morgan into a seat.

Violet’s face lit up with rapture. She wrapped her arms around Casey’s neck. “Major Casey Sir!”

He unceremoniously plunked her in the chair next to Morgan’s. “I was told breakfast was mandatory.”

“You’re cheerful as ever this morning, Major,” Morgan said. “Sweet dreams of enemy fire and bowie knives, I’m guessing?”

“Quiet.” Casey speared a stack of pancakes and dragged them onto his plate. He turned slightly in his chair to give Chuck and Sarah a look. “We’ve talked about this.”

“PDA police is here,” Chuck said, but he gave her another quick kiss—Casey made one of those subsonic growling noises—before he sat at the table, leaving the last seat for her. Sir plopped his giant haunches on the tiled floor next to Chuck’s seat, obviously recognizing a soft touch when he saw one.

“Just shut up and let me eat,” Casey said, glaring at him. When Violet gave him a puzzled look, he sighed. “I’m hungry, okay?”

“Well, you’re lucky Sarah made lots and lots.”

“Enough to feed an army, for sure,” Chuck said. “They look good, Sarah.”

“Thanks.”

Violet looked confused. “But Major Casey Sir, you said you were Marines, not Army.”

“Hoorah,” Casey said.

Sarah had to fight back the urge to laugh. “It’s so nice to have everybody together like this, don’t you think?”

“What does ‛Hoorah’ mean?”

* * *

“God bless _Yo Gabba Gabba_ ,” Chuck said as he shut off the shower.

Sarah stepped out first, grabbing the towel that was still a little damp from her earlier shower. “Are you going to thank a random cartoon every time we have sex? Is that going to become a thing?”

“You mock, but it has been a long time to me, and it feels disrespectful to thank the deities even though I swear I saw them—again.”

They both scrambled into clothes. “Did they look like me again?”

“Not even close to as good as you.”

Sarah, in the middle of shimmying back into her underwear, laughed. “That’s an incredible line. You didn’t find it in the Intersect, did you?”

“I don’t know if the Intersect is good at helping me pick up chicks, but, hey, it did bring you into my life, so.”

Sarah grabbed his face and gave him a long kiss, though she could feel him laughing a little—until he abruptly stopped and they both had trouble breathing. “How long is _Yo Gabba Gabba_?”

“Not nearly long enough.”

Reluctantly, they broke apart. Sarah stepped back to keep a little distance between them while she waited for her heart-rate to slow. Three months of hiding from surveillance cameras meant things had apparently been a lot more pent up than she expected, evidently. “What time did Sophie say she was coming?” she asked as she pulled her shirt back on.

Chuck tossed her the comb when she gestured. “She said two, so we can probably expect her around three. I haven’t told Vi yet.”

“Are you going to?”

“I think it’s okay to let this one be a surprise, in case she doesn’t show.”

Sarah thought of her own childhood and all of her father’s broken promises. “Probably for the best. You’re dressed, you should probably go see if Casey and Violet have burned the place down. I’ll need a minute.”

“Why? You look perfect.”

“Charmer. But if Casey sees me with wet hair, he’s going to wonder why I needed a second shower.”

“Cleanliness is next to godliness,” Chuck said. “And given how angelic you are, you’re a very godly woman—”

“Okay, that went from smooth to cheesy,” Sarah said, though she laughed as she gave him a kiss and shoved him out of the bathroom. She tidied up, reapplying all of her makeup and blow-drying her hair in almost record time. She figured they were probably pushing their luck, sneaking away while Violet was distracted by a colorful TV program, but Chuck had given her a _look_ after breakfast, and she hadn’t been able to resist slipping into the shower after him, and if they were being a little reckless, so what? There weren’t any cameras or bugs around to catch them. All too soon they would be back in Burbank and back to the status quo and the constant eyes on them. Casey could grit his teeth and bear it.

On second thought, Casey could shove it. He didn’t need to be _that_ grumpy. Come to think of it, actually, he’d been rather disproportionately cranky all day. He had general flavors of grumpiness, really, and she’d become pretty attuned to them during her time in Burbank. Usually she let him deal with those moods—god, he was like a teenager sometimes—on his own, but since they were pretty much living in each other’s pockets this week, maybe it was best to get to the core of what was bothering him.

She bypassed the living room, where Chuck and Violet were rough-housing while Sir galomped around them, and walked into the garage. Sure enough, Casey was there, pounding away at the snowmobile. “Just curious, but is this regular grumpiness or is something bothering you more than usual?” she asked.

He banged his hand against the snowmobile, which only made him swear. Belatedly, Sarah realized she probably should have made a noise. “What the hell, Walker?”

“You’re being a grouch. I’m being a good partner and making sure there’s not something more than general Casey crankiness going on.”

“Who the hell says I’m cranky? Not all of us have to deal with pathetic nerd-loving this week, Walker.”

“You’re cranky,” she said when he finally glared at her. “Something’s up. What is it?”

“Why do you care?”

“Can’t say I really do.” 

She folded her arms over her chest and stared. It wasn’t a threatening stare—that never really worked on him unless she was well and truly pissed—but it _was_ one of the things she’d picked up from Violet. And because of that, it was effective. Casey broke and sighed, though the annoyance didn’t lessen. He grumbled wordlessly as he reached into his back pocket and fished out his phone. A couple of taps of his thumb later, he tossed it to her.

Sarah blinked. It was a surveillance feed of their own living room, filled with construction workers. Beckman had warned her this would happen, but unease still sat like a lump in her gut. “What’s the big deal? We knew this was coming.”

He glared. “Look harder, Walker.”

“I don’t see anyt—ooh. Oh, no.” They’d moved the picture of Ronald Reagan. Did they have a death wish? Sarah winced and closed the feed before she tossed the phone back. No wonder he was so cranky. “I’m sure they’ll put it back right where they got it, Casey.”

“Like hell they will. Damned pissants.”

“I’ll call Beckman and—”

“And what? Laugh at me?”

“I was going to say ‛take care of it.’ The Gipper will be right back where he belongs.” They both glanced at their phones when they chirped off a proximity alert. “However, I’ll have to do that later. It looks like Sophie’s early.”

Casey moved over to the garage door to peek through the panes. “Standard SUV. Smart. If she weren’t wasting her life with that acting career, she’d make a good agent.”

“There’s a cheerful thought.” Sarah pushed her hair back and straightened her shoulders. Encounters with Sophie tended to be awkward.

“Good for us she’s so paranoid. Makes our jobs easier. Keeps the kid out of the tabloids, too.”

“Still, I can’t help but wonder why she changed her mind and came to visit,” Sarah said.

Casey gave her a long, measuring look. Apparently she wasn’t the only one who had picked up something from Violet.

“She’s only getting more famous, Casey,” Sarah said with a sigh. “A friend owed me a solid, so a few weeks back, I had him hack into a few of the tabloids’ networks, see how big of a fuss there is around Sophie Marston. It’s pretty big, and only growing. There are rumors that her career’s taking off.”

“And the paparazzi are only going to get worse?”

“It looks like.”

“Well, there’s a pleasant thought. Have fun playing the new interfering girlfriend with Violet’s mom. I’m going to go see what’s in the basement until she leaves.”

“Feel free to stay down there indefinitely, asshole,” Sarah said under her breath as he left.

She took a couple of minutes checking the surveillance feed from her own phone rather than going out to greet Sophie. She needed to make sure that they hadn’t actually damaged Casey’s picture of Ronald Reagan. If it came down to her to prevent World War Three, so be it. But eventually she sighed to herself, pocketed the phone, and went into the living room.

“Oh, there you are,” Chuck said, his head jerking up. She frowned at the relieved note in his voice, but it occurred to her that if things were weird between her and Sophie, they must be even stranger between Sophie and Chuck. Especially if they weren’t arguing. “Were you hiding somewhere?”

“No, just checking on something in the garage.”

“Sarah!” Violet bounced over in her snow pants and tugged on Sarah’s arm, excitedly. “Did you see? Did you see? My mom’s here. She came to visit me.”

“I see! Hi, Sophie.” She mustered up her friendliest smile, which wasn’t easy to do in the wake of Casey’s accusations.

Sophie looked equally awkward, at least. “Sarah. Hi. I hope you’re not mad at me for intruding on your vacation.”

“No, it’s great. And honestly, I think it’s Ellie’s vacation. The rest of us just follow orders.”

Sophie forced an uneasy laugh.

“I can’t deny it,” Chuck said. “She’s hired a photographer to come take snow portraits and everything. It’s a bit like living with a military general. But don’t worry, she’s out skiing right now.”

“Oh, thank god,” Sophie said, and the stab of sympathy Sarah felt was genuine. She wouldn’t want to be Ellie Bartowski’s greatest enemy either.

“Mom came all this way just to see me,” Violet said, tugging on Sarah’s arm again. “And we’re going to play in the snow and build snowmen like Squidward. Are you coming, too?”

“I think it should just be you and your mom for a little while,” Sarah said. “But I promise to admire the snowman later. Actually, why don’t I help you get into the rest of your outside gear, let your mom talk to your dad for a minute.”

“Coward,” Chuck muttered as she moved around him.

“Damned straight.” Though she gave him a wink.

In the mudroom, she helped Violet into the layers of clothing, again marveling that this had become her life. She snugged the hat down on Violet’s head and had to bite back the urge to laugh. The girl looked like a pink and purple marshmallow. She could see maybe one tiny strip of skin and Violet’s bright blue eyes peeping between the scarf and the hat.

“What’s so funny?”

“Can you even move?” Sarah asked.

Violet wiggled around like a penguin. “Of course I can.”

“Of course you can.”

“She looks like that abominable snowman thing you showed me, but pink,” Sarah told Chuck a few minutes later, after Sophie had taken Violet outside. They’d made themselves comfortable on the couch, Chuck with his head resting on her thigh and Sarah holding a mug of tea. “We may be overdressing her.”

“Southern California baby,” Chuck said. “We have notoriously thin blood. Besides, she’ll start stripping layers if she gets too warm. And we’ll undoubtedly miss a few when she does, so some poor schmo that rents this cabin next will find, like, a single glove in the snow, and they’ll always wonder.”

“Well, as long as we provide absolute strangers with a mystery.” Sarah turned on the TV and began flicking through the channels. She hadn’t really discussed Sophie’s surprise in depth with him, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Casey hadn’t sounded surprised when she brought up her theory, which meant he’d likely seen the signs for himself. Chuck probably had, too. Or had he? He could look at the world through some pretty rosy lenses when he wanted to. It was a skill that Sarah envied, even though her heart ached a little at the potential pain that was heading down the line. Violet really only saw her mother once a month, and Sarah got the feeling that the little girl was picking up on the fact that there was something different about it, but it would still hurt like nothing else if Sophie chose to break ties completely.

No matter how much easier it would make protecting Chuck.

“I think I should be worried,” Chuck said, making her jolt a little. “You’re rocking a pretty serious face there, Sarah Walker.”

“Was I? Just thinking.”

“About me?”

“Sure,” Sarah said, and Chuck grinned.

“You know, there’s nothing really stopping us from staying here on the couch and just necking like a couple of teenagers,” Chuck said. He wiggled his eyebrows.

“I will shoot you both,” Casey said from behind the couch. They both winced a little as they heard him stomping into the kitchen.

“Well, he’s a spoilsport.” Chuck sat up and propped his socked feet up on the coffee table. He did an elaborate stretching move that somehow ended with his arm around her shoulders, and Sarah shook her head at him. “He can at least let me have this.”

“I think he woke up on the wrong side of the bed,” Sarah said. “I don’t think he’d actually shoot us.”

“Would be totally worth it. And my god, I have no idea what is _up_ with me today. It’s like Smooth Operator Chuck took over my body. I have to say, it’s a little annoying. Where was that guy when I needed him in college, huh?”

“I thought you were monogamous in college.”

“Yeah, and look how well that ended for me. It’s like—wait, is that what’s bothering you?”

Sarah had to blink at that one a few times. “Monogamy in college?”

“No. Uh, no.” Chuck withdrew his arm and shifted so that he was facing her. “Sorry, that segue is a little hard to follow. But is that what’s got that look on your face? Regretting sleeping with me?”

“You’re going to have to explain that segue to me. How did you get from college Chuck to me regretting sleeping with you?”

“Jill, mostly, but that’s not important. Is that what it is?”

“No,” Sarah said, because even though she wondered at the wisdom of taking their relationship up a level—and she really needed to spend less time among video game nerds—she didn’t actually regret sleeping with Chuck. Maybe she’d wondered if it was actually the smart thing to do. But the act itself? She was already counting the hours until they could be alone, and Casey could go stuff a sock in it. “No, that’s not it. I definitely do not regret sleeping with you.”

“Well, I’m sure I can do plenty to help you change your mind.”

Sarah ignored Casey’s potential wrath to lean forward and give him a long kiss. “Not going to change my mind.”

“Sure, you say that now—”

“Chuck, do me a favor: stop talking.”

“Yes, ma’am. Though I’m still curious, for the record.” Chuck gasped when Sarah’s hand slid up his thigh. “But there’s always time for curiosity later, I’ve found.”

“Good policy.” Sarah went still as she spotted something over his shoulder.

She didn’t mask the movement enough, which wasn’t a surprise because she was half in Chuck’s lap. He jerked up, nearly dislodging Sarah. “What? What is it? Vi? Is she—”

“She’s fine.” Sarah could see both Violet and Sophie outside, darting in among the trees. As Sarah scanned the tree-line, Sophie snatched Violet up and spun her around, and they collapsed into the snow, no doubt to make snow angels. “See?”

“Then what’s the matter? You reacted to something.”

“Not sure yet. I’m going to go check the property.”

“Vi should come inside—”

“Actually, you should go outside and build a snowman with her. It’ll be fine.” Sarah made sure the look on her face was absolutely supportive and calm. “I’m just being paranoid. Casey and I will check it out, okay?”

He was already heading for the mudroom. “Are you sure?”

“Positive. We need to keep up appearances.”

“But—”

“Chuck, do you trust me?”

He swallowed hard. “Of course.”

“Then go on. Play with your daughter. It’ll be fine.”

She left him in the mudroom and headed for the kitchen and Casey. “We’ve got a problem,” she said.

“What is it?”

“I think Sophie was followed.”


	8. Shuffle

It had been ten minutes.

Ten long, unbearable minutes where he hadn’t seen a thing or heard a word from Sarah. There was no sign that anything was off outside or in the cabin. Even the woods sounded normal—or as normal as they possibly could to Chuck, who regularly took pride in the fact that he was very much a city boy. But now, up in Lake Tahoe with _no idea_ about what could be wrong, Chuck felt a sweat droplet slide down his back between his shoulder blades and wondered for the fiftieth time what exactly his girlfriend was doing.

“Chuck? Are you all right?” Sophie gave him an odd look, which made sense. She was the actor, not him. He was just a computer programmer who’d happened to wander into the spy world by playing the wrong video game at the wrong time. 

“I’m fine,” Chuck said, but he crouched quickly to help Vi so she wouldn’t get a good look at his face.

Vi evidently didn’t notice a thing, as she was focused on rolling the giant snowball that would hopefully become the head of Patrick, their latest snowman. They had a veritable army of tiny snowmen (Chuck supposed some of them were women because Vi had named a couple Daisy and Frun-ca, which he thought sounded vaguely feminine) they had made the morning before, but Vi kept insisting, “Bigger!”

“Okay,” Sophie said. “How’s that snowman head going, baby?”

“Little bit bigger,” Vi said as she grunted and rolled the lopsided snowball over. “Patrick needs to be like a giant.”

“That’s going to make a ginormous snowman,” Sophie said. Her cheeks were red with the cold, her white-blonde hair sticking out from under her blue cap in ringlets, and even though Chuck knew he looked like a frozen mess, he could understand why a lot of people liked Sophie. Even cold from goofing off in the snow with her daughter, she had the movie star good looks. And Vi’s eyes, of course.

“Abso _lute_ ly ginormous,” Vi said, nodding. She grunted once more and tried to roll the snowman head over.

“Here, let me help you with that,” Chuck said. As he reached for the misshapen lump of snow, though, disaster struck: Vi teetered, wobbling precariously for a split second, and crashed down right on top of the fruits of her labor. Snow seemed to explode around her like a smothered grenade, flying in all directions. Both he and Sophie gasped and reached for her.

Violet, however, took one look at the clumps of snow left over and burst into tears.

“Oh, baby.” Sophie scooped her up first while Chuck sat back on his haunches. “Baby, it’s okay.” She made shushing noises, looking only a little panicked.

Violet went stiff as a board and arched away from her, twisting with her arms outstretched. Chuck winced a little; she’d grown so big lately that that knee to Sophie’s side had to hurt, but Sophie didn’t even flinch. Instead, she passed the crying Violet over to Chuck with a tiny sigh. She wasted no time clutching the front of his new parka, burrowing in.

‘Sorry,’ he mouthed at Sophie.

She gave him a ‘what can you do?’ shrug.

He jiggled his daughter, trying to figure out if it was simply over-excitement or if she perhaps needed a longer nap than usual. Their routine had been completely wrecked by being in Tahoe. He was amazed the break-down had taken this long. 

“What’s the matter, huh?” he asked, eyeing the woods once more. Where were Sarah and Casey? What was going on? “Does anything hurt?”

Violet hiccupped and let out a wail, sobbing out a name that he finally figured out was “Patrick!” She curled in, making herself as small as possible. “I killed him, Daddy. Patrick’s dead.”

Chuck met Sophie’s eyes over the top of their daughter’s head. She turned away, covering her mouth with a snow-covered mitten, and if he were any less freaked out, Chuck might have laughed along. “Hey, no, you didn’t kill Patrick,” he said. In his pocket, he felt his cell phone buzz, so he bit the tip of his finger to pull the glove off. “What’s Patrick made of?”

“Snow,” Violet said, sniffling. She wiped her mitten across her nose, which made Sophie wince.

“And what’s all around us?” He fished his cell phone free.

Violet looked around, eyes bright from crying. “Snow?” she said.

“Indeed,” Chuck said as he glanced at the phone. A text from Sarah: _all clear. Stay and play a few minutes._

Relief flooded through him. He set Violet down on the snow and crouched in front of her. In a gruff voice, he said, “Gentlemen—I mean, ladies. We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world’s first bionic snowman. Patrick will be that snowman. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.”

Sophie gave him a puzzled look, but it got the results he sought: Violet swiped at her face again and giggled. “You’re silly,” she said, giving him a giant smacking kiss on the cheek. “Mom, can you help me? We have to make him bigger and stronger and better, like Daddy said.”

In the end, Patrick II (so named in respect to his fallen brethren) was indeed bigger and stronger than his predecessor. Violet pranced around him in delight and tackled Sir, who’d been let out of the house by Sarah, it looked like, giving Chuck and Sophie a chance to stand back and breathe for a couple of minutes.

Sophie was the first to break the silence. “Thanks,” she said. 

“For what?”

“Letting me crash your vacation a little. I know it’s not convenient.”

Chuck hunched his shoulders toward his ears. “She’s happy,” he said, hugging his arms in close. “She likes spending time with you.”

Sophie’s sigh was long and quiet. “I know. And I want more time with her.”

Chuck felt his eyebrows lower. He and Sophie hadn’t spoken this openly in…well, years, honestly. Things had been strained when she had been more actively involved, before the audition that would change everything. They’d mutually and silently agreed simply to avoid arguing unless it truly mattered and just focus on raising Vi. At first, when she had been equally involved, it had been like attempting to play a two-player game with a virtual stranger, but lately he’d been carrying the game all by himself. “You do?” he asked.

It took Sophie a moment to answer. “I don’t know if it’s possible. Not without letting the world know about her in some way.”

Casey and Sarah wouldn’t like that, Chuck knew. He didn’t like it much himself. He didn’t even bother to think about Beckman and Graham’s reactions would be, as he really didn’t want to imagine Washington D.C. as a smoking crater. “Hm,” he said.

“But…you should know I have somebody in my life now.”

“A serious somebody?” Chuck asked. They both winced as Violet careened into the dog, but Sir just _woof_ ed politely and girl and beast gamboled on. 

“Pretty serious, yes.”

“Does he know about her?” 

Sophie shook her head. “I can’t help but I admit that I envy you what you have with Sarah. She’s good with Violet. So open.”

“Open? Sarah?” Chuck nearly started laughing, except he couldn’t deny it was a little true. Sure, he didn’t know what Sarah thought half the time and it drove him crazy, especially on those nights where they shared his bed with CIA and NSA surveillance. But with Violet, there had never been any real need to guess where she stood. She’d always been kind of an open book. And he knew better than to tell her that. “Yeah, I guess so. Vi took to her right away, and you know how she is.”

“Tenacious,” Sophie said. Sadness flickered across her face for an instant. “To the point of bull-headed. I’m sorry. She gets that from me.”

“Hey, I have my moments.” Sarah called him names when he refused to budge on missions after all. “So what’s happening with the ‘somebody,’ then? Is he going to know about Vi eventually?”

“Eventually,” Sophie said. “If he, you know, sticks around.”

“That might change things for you,” Chuck said.

“I have to decide if I trust somebody besides my assistant to know that I have a daughter. It definitely changes things. I envy you, you know, for getting to go to the grocery store without people watching you all the time.”

Chuck choked back a bitter laugh. “Yeah, it’s nice,” he lied, thinking of the two secret agents in the house and the number of times he’d been dangled off of a building by his heels since downloading the Intersect. “Just…a normal guy.”

Sophie gave him a puzzled look and he supposed he was failing at acting again. Time to cut and run, he decided. “And on that note, I think I’m gonna go back inside and let you two have a little girl time,” he said. But he made it two or three steps before curiosity got the better of him and he turned back. “Hey, Soph?”

“Yeah?”

Chuck licked his lips. “Knowing what you do now, that your career was going to explode, would you…”

Sophie gave him a bleak look, one he completely understood because he’d experienced that emotion in full, acerbic detail right after Bryce Larkin has sent him the Intersect. “I don’t know that I would.”

“Oh.” Chuck felt the old disappointment settle back in. 

“It’s better for her, not being in the spotlight. She’s at least got a chance of living her life outside of a fishbowl.” Sophie looked down and kicked at a bit of snow with her boot. “I got lucky. She’s got you, and that’s all she needs.”

Chuck swallowed his answer that Violet deserved her wants as well as her needs, and nodded. “Thanks for being honest,” he said, and went inside. 

He stripped out of his outer gear in the mudroom, peeling off the snow-covered gloves and unwinding his scarf. “Sarah? You in here?” he called, expecting she’d gone back to the living room, where she could watch over the three of them from that vantage point.

There was no answer.

“Casey?” Chuck asked, poking his head out. The living room was empty, though the TV was still on, bleating cheerfully about a game show coming up. He toed out of his snow boots and his wet socks and, barefoot, he crossed to the bedroom he and Sarah were sharing for the week: empty as well. “Huh.”

Dread began to gnaw at his stomach. Had something gone wrong? He’d only received a text, not a call from Sarah, which meant somebody could have grabbed her phone. Frantic, he checked the basement (empty), Casey and Morgan’s room (ditto), and finally he barged into the garage.

He found himself staring down the barrels of two very familiar guns.

“Whoa, don’t shoot,” Chuck said, his hands rising reflexively. Then he blinked. “Uh, Sarah?”

She holstered her gun with an annoyed look. “Yes, Chuck?”

“Why is there a man duck-taped to that chair? No, make that why is there an unconscious man in his underwear duck-taped to that chair?” He’d never seen the man, and the Intersect wasn’t forthcoming either. But even as used as he was to their missions going pear-shaped, finding a restrained and mostly naked man in the garage of his sister’s time-share cabin seemed like it might be a new low. 

“Because.” Casey holstered his gun as well, though he looked grumpy. 

“Gonna need more than one words as an answer,” Chuck said. He moved toward the man—to do what, he wasn’t sure, maybe check to see if his pupils were dilating or something—but Sarah put a hand on his chest to stop him. “Sarah? Who is he?”

“He’s a paparazzo,” Sarah said.

“Is he…dead?”

“Just unconscious. As far as we can tell, he followed Sophie.”

The temperature in the garage dropped to even colder levels. Chuck swiveled to look at the door and then back at Sarah. “He was taking pictures of Sophie and—and Vi? He was doing that?”

“We stopped him before he could get too many. Do me a favor.” Sarah handed him a cell phone. “Can you break the encryption on this?”

“Y-yeah, give me a second.” He had to run to their room to get his laptop, all of his thoughts racing and bouncing. This was a nightmare. They’d talked about what might happen if the news that Sophie had a secret daughter were to air publicly, and the agents’ faces had been absolutely grim. So if they’d caught a guy _before_ he could report in, now what? A bunker in eastern Europe? Forced subliminal memory adjustments? It sounded like the plot of a bad movie.

He skidded back into the garage just in time for Casey to let out a ripe curse. “What?” Chuck asked, eyes widening. “What is it?”

“Memory card’s attached to his computer, which is on a 3G network. All of the pictures he took were automatically uploaded into an online album.”

This time, Chuck and Sarah swore together. 

“Maybe I can stop them,” Chuck said. He tossed his laptop to Sarah as he ran for Casey and the paparazzo’s little netbook. “There’s a file on the desktop—uh, I think it’s NotAKitty0212.exe,” he said. “Hook the phone in and run execute, it’ll break through that. Casey, let me see, there might be a way to stop the upload. Was he alone?”

“I tracked his car down. He parked a couple of blocks away and hiked in,” Casey said.

“And he’s in his underwear because?” 

“If he gets away, won’t get far in the snow,” Sarah said, typing just as fast as he was.

Chuck pulled up the upload program the paparazzo had used and cursed to himself. All of the photos were already online. He moved to the bookmarks folder, where his prayers were answered: the photographer had bookmarked his media upload site and the cookies on his computer meant he’d already signed in. Chuck’s eyes widened. There were hundreds of thousands of pictures, the most recent being a couple of bright white pictures that he recognized as the cabin’s backyard, and then orange-yellow-reddish pictures that had to be from inside the Nugget casino. In them, Sophie sat at a poker table, drinking a margarita and chatting and laughing with a friend.

“It looks like only a couple uploaded,” he said, and the screen changed.

Casey leaned over his shoulder. “What the hell? Did you just delete those?”

“I didn’t do anything!” But both men and Sarah watched in astonishment as the snowy pictures of Sophie and Vi vanished, one by one. “What’s happening?”

“You tell me,” Casey said. The last snow picture disappeared, leaving only pictures from the casino. “Did somebody download those?”

Chuck brought up the log file for the album. “No, only two users have access to this—Mr. Naked over there and a P. Schultz. I’m guessing that’s his boss.”

“Pat Schultz of Starshine Photography, LLC,” Sarah said. When Casey and Chuck looked at her in surprise, she held up a wallet. “He’s got business cards for both him—Harry Kresnick—and a Pat Schultz. I’m guessing they’re either business partners or that’s his boss.”

“Well, Pat hasn’t accessed this folder.” Chuck squinted at the log and jerked when the line about 47 photos being uploaded on that day’s date vanished. “In fact, there’s absolutely no record of those pictures ever existing in the folder at all. If I hadn’t just seen them, I wouldn’t believe it myself.”

“Pictures don’t just delete themselves, Bartowski,” Casey said, folding his arms over his chest. “Somebody has to be behind this.”

“I’m telling you, they’re gone. Like they weren’t even there.” Chuck gestured helplessly at the computer. “Are they still on the memory card?”

Casey grabbed a battered DSLR camera and pulled up the last image on the viewfinder. “Gone.”

“So something’s hinky,” Chuck said. “Unless Sophie has some kind of digital…angel looking out for her?”

Sarah frowned. “I don’t think it’s Sophie,” she said.

“What?”

“Let me—Casey, take over this, see if you can’t break the phone? I got the program running.” The spies switched places, Sarah nudging Chuck out of the way as she bent over Harry Kresnick’s little netbook. She paged through the photos from the night before. “My guess is this guy followed Sophie up to Tahoe, given that his home address is in Compton, which means he’s been watching her this whole time.”

“So?” Casey asked.

“So, what time did you talk to her last night, Chuck?”

Chuck thought back. “Uh, right after we got to the Nugget. It wasn’t that long. I did the slot machines a little, and it was literally right before your text.”

“Text?” Casey asked.

“Never mind,” both Sarah and Chuck said. The former checked her phone for something and then paged down. “Uh-huh, just as I thought.” 

“What?”

“It looks like every picture with Chuck in it has been erased. Look at the time stamps on the files. It jumps about six minutes.”

“So what, are you saying that there literally _is_ a digital guardian angel and he or she is looking out for Sophie, Vi, and me?”

“Just you and Vi.” Casey made a noise when Harry Kresnick’s phone chirped. “Looks like that decryption software worked. For once.”

“Hey,” Chuck said, insult making him glare.

Casey shrugged. “You were handed the Intersect project to decrypt how many months ago, Bartowski? Good to know your magic works on a phone.”

“Quit being a jerk and tell us if he made any outgoing calls,” Sarah said. 

Casey picked up the unlocked phone and scrolled through. “Just an outgoing text, about twenty minutes ago.”

“About Vi?” Chuck asked, his muscles locking up in fear.

“I assume so, but it’s just a bunch of exclamation points. No real data, no response from Schultz.” Casey’s snort made it clear how he felt about improper grammar during texting. “No calls. If he told anybody, it wasn’t on this phone or anything he had on him.”

“I’ll contact Pat Schultz,” Sarah said. “See if he has any idea about Violet’s existence.”

“And if he does?” Chuck asked, eyeing the mostly naked man warily.

“Then we’ll contain it.”

“Contain it _how_?”

“Don’t worry, he won’t feel a thing,” Casey said, and Chuck felt himself visibly pale. The NSA agent laughed. “Government drug. He’ll wake up in twelve hours with a headache and no memory of the past two days. Relax, nerd.”

“How can I relax? There’s somebody online—a much better hacker than me, by the way—deleting pictures and evidence of me and my daughter. How are you not freaking out about this?”

“Because right now, it’s helpful,” Sarah said. She grabbed his arm right above the elbow and even that small touch was enough to make him relax a tiny bit.

“Not looking a gift horse in the mouth?” he asked.

“Prioritizing threats. You need to go back out and keep anybody from coming in here. We’ve got people coming to take Mr. Kresnick back to his hotel, but right now, we need a decoy. Just go back out, watch TV, and act natural.”

“Not really one of my strong suits.” Chuck took a deep, deep breath as she pulled him toward the door back into the house. He’d grown as used to missions as he passably could, he thought, but it was never the same thing twice. And the idea that somebody had sneaked in to take pictures of his little girl made his blood want to boil at the same time as knowing he had some kind of unknown digital guardian angel made his temperature drop to subzero. He took another deep breath.

“Are you okay?” Sarah asked.

“No mushy stuff right now!” Casey called to both of them. Sarah flipped him the bird. 

“Yeah,” Chuck said, ignoring Casey. “Yeah, I’m fine. I just—by god, that man has a lot of body hair. I’m going to see that mental image every time I close my eyes.”

Sarah quirked an eyebrow at him. “Bet I can change that later,” she said, and Chuck felt over-warm in an entirely new way when he stepped out of the garage.

He was just in time, too, for right as he closed the door behind him, he heard a giant _woof_ and a very snow-covered Sir raced at him, full speed. “What the—no! Down, Sir! Down!” It was an absolutely useless gesture, as the dog ignored him entirely, planting his giant paws on Chuck’s shoulders and licking at his chin.

“I hate you,” Chuck told him without rancor.

“Daddy!” Violet, considerably less snow-covered than her beloved hound, bounced across the room. She had melting snow in her hair. Sophie followed at a more sedate pace. “We made _three_ more minions for the snow army. It was so cool. You have to see.”

“I’ll definitely check them out later,” Chuck said, shoving the puppy off of him. All three of them froze when Sir nudged around him, nose pointed at the door, and growled. “What the…Sir, no! Bad dog!”

“Is something wrong?” Sophie asked.

Chuck grabbed the dog’s collar and tried to pull him away, but the dog wouldn’t budge. Why couldn’t they have gotten a Pomeranian? “He doesn’t like the garage,” Chuck lied.

Violet blinked. “He _loves_ the garage. That’s where the snowmobile that Major Casey Sir is fixing up. Wanna see it, Mom? It’s really cool. Uncle Morgan says this is the year he’s going to get it working.”

“No!” Chuck said, and both Violet and her mother blinked at him. “What I mean is…uh, who wants hot chocolate?”

“Are you hiding something in the garage, Chuck?” Sophie asked, and Chuck shook his head at her, frantically. “Is something going on?”

“You’re acting really weird,” Vi said.

“Yes, thank you for that, Megabyte. I appreciate your support, as always.” Chuck tugged ineffectually at the dog collar. First thing when he got back, he was putting the stupid dog in obedience training. He should have done that months ago. “I wasn’t kidding about the hot chocolate. With marshmallows and everything. Aren’t you cold?”

“I wanna see what’s in the garage,” Vi said.

“No,” Chuck started to say.

He was saved by the garage door itself opening. Sarah stepped through, hastily buttoning up her shirt with a sheepish look on her face. “Sorry!” she said, resting a hand on Sir’s scruff. The traitor plopped his haunches on the ground. “Sorry about that. I, um, got distracted. Did I hear something about hot chocolate?”

“Oh, boy,” Sophie said. “Whoops.”

“Happens all the time,” Sarah said, waving an easy hand. She scooped up Vi and spun her around. “You’re all wet. C’mon, let’s go get you a new shirt and some dry socks. Chuck, you got the hot chocolate?”

“Coming right up. Soph, you want any?”

“Actually I probably need to get going. My flight leaves in a couple of hours and I still need to check out of the hotel.”

Vi’s lower lip wobbled. “You’re leaving?” 

Sarah set the girl down. “We’ll give you a minute. C’mon, Sir.”

“Sorry, I tried to distract them,” Chuck said when they were safely out of earshot in the kitchen. “I really did. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. His fault, anyway.” But Sarah crouched to give the dog a good rub behind the ears. “Casey’s checking and the door’s locked now. I think the situation’s contained. As long as we can get the guy out of here before Ellie and Devon get back, we should be okay.”

“And even more importantly, as long as we can get Sophie out of here before Ellie gets back, we’ll be golden,” Chuck said.

They both went still as they heard the front door open. Sir let out another woof and raced out of the kitchen, and they heard an “Oh!” in surprise.

“I just jinxed us, didn’t I?” Chuck asked, closing his eyes.

Sarah stretched up on her tiptoes to give him a long kiss. “Yup,” she said. “Let’s go face the music.”

“Can this day get any crazier?”

“Let’s not find out.” And she pulled him out of the kitchen.


	9. Recovery

It was indeed possible to go stir-crazy when you’d been handed everything you wanted, Sarah found. She was away from the surveillance cameras, Casey didn’t really care about her relations with Chuck (though complaining had gone up four hundred percent), and they had a week to do nothing but _relax_ and enjoy the snow together. Sure, things had been a little tense, as Ellie had been less than pleased that they hadn’t warned her of Sophie’s arrival in Tahoe, but it had blown over in a storm of bad jokes and shared hot chocolate. So really, everything had calmed down, she and Chuck had found a way to make plenty of alone time, and she had pretty much everything she’d been daydreaming about for months.

And she was going a little nuts.

“Anything?” she asked as she poked her head into the room Casey and Morgan were being forced to share for the week. The latter had disappeared off to the Buy More again, which Sarah couldn’t help but be grateful for. She found that Morgan was really best tolerated in small doses and those doses needed to be heavily tempered with Violet. 

Casey, hunched over the little kid-sized desk in the corner, glared. “Walker, did you hear any shouts of ‘Eureka’ or ‘Huzzah?’”

“No,” Sarah said. “I wouldn’t even if you had found something because Chuck isn’t in here and nobody says that, anyway. I’m asking for a status update and communicating with real, adult words.”

Casey dragged one hand down his face. “Nothing,” he said. “News hasn’t leaked that Sophie Marston has a kid, the agents watching Kresnick have seen no signs that the very exhaustive line of drugs we forced into him are failing, and there is literally no trace of our mysterious hacker. Satisfied?”

“It’s weird, Casey.”

“Why do you think I’m in this useless command center and not out on the slopes?”

“I know whoever did it is helping us out, but I don’t like having an ally I can’t trust.” Sarah folded her arms over her chest. 

“Get in line, Walker,” Casey said. He tapped his index finger against the scratched surface of the desk a couple of times in agitation. “Are we sure it’s not Chuck doing this?”

“What?”

“The nerd has the skills. They wouldn’t let him look at Intersect code if he didn’t.” Casey swiveled to face her. He had his shoulders hunched almost to his ears, his arms crossed uncomfortably over his chest. “How sure are we that he’s not lying to us?”

Sarah narrowed her eyes. It was on the tip of her tongue to point out that she could read Chuck’s body language very well, thank you very much, and he had been just as puzzled by the deleted pictures as the rest of them. But Casey expected that reaction. He sought the hotheaded denial, another test of his to see if he should sanction the relationship. 

Sarah forced that answer down. “Why would he?” she asked.

“Profit? If it’s him, he’s created a facial recognition software that doesn’t give a damn about any security firewalls set up. I wouldn’t be in a hurry to hand that over to the government agency currently exploiting me, either.”

“If it were somebody else, I’d agree. But Chuck?”

“It’s a stretch. But can you think of anybody else?”

“What about Bryce?”

“He claimed not to know Chuck had a kid. I mean, he’s a good liar—”

“Not that good,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “Casey, it’s not Chuck.”

Her partner sighed. “You’re right. This guy, whoever it is, he is _good_. Even Bartowski’s not on that level.”

“Don’t tell him that, he’ll sulk. Anything further from the bosses?”

“As far as I can tell, they’ve decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth and given how specific this hacker’s target is, they don’t want to assign extra people to it. They’re worried research will tip off any analysts that we have an asset living on US soil.”

“So…we deal with it in-house?” 

Casey typed in a couple of commands, shutting down the computer. “We deal with it when we get back to Burbank. Renovations on our houses are done, we’ll have more resources. Until then? We’re stuck in this cabin.”

“Nope.” Sarah clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m stuck in this cabin. You’re hitting the slopes.”

“What?”

“Threat is minimal right now. You go get some slope time in, I’ll stay with Chuck and Violet. Try not to crash into a tree. The family pictures none of us can avoid are tomorrow.”

Casey snorted as they clattered down the stairs together. “Please, like I’d ever hit a tree.” 

“You fear Ellie Bartowski too much,” Sarah said, clapping him on the shoulder again and breaking off before he could disagree. 

Downstairs, she found her boyfriend and his daughter sacked out in front of the couch, their eyes glued to the TV screen. Chuck’s gaze looked a little glassy—her fault, she’d kept him up late—but Violet stared in absolute intrigue at the episode of _Dora the Explorer_ playing. Sarah glanced at the window and thought about her restlessness. “Are we going to stay inside all day?”

Immediately, Violet twisted around. “Are we gonna build another snowman?”

“We’ve got so many snowmen surrounding this cabin, Calvin and Hobbes are jealous,” Chuck said. “But yeah, we’ve watched enough TV for a while, Megabyte. Even though it’s vacation, and it’s our god given right to lay around like the lazy slobs we are.”

“Amen,” Violet said solemnly.

Chuck twisted to grin at Sarah. “I taught her that,” he said, hooking an arm around Violet as he climbed to his feet. “All by myself. We worked that whole routine. Next up, we’re going to tackle _Who’s On First?_ We’ll be famous.”

“Famous,” Violet echoed, nodding.

“Well, in the meantime, why don’t we go outside and play?” Sarah said.

“I’ve got an idea for something we can do. You get the kid trussed up, I’ll see if I can find it.”

With Ellie and Devon on the slopes and Morgan gone, it was down to four pairs of boots and all of their outerwear in the mudroom. “You’d better get ready for this because this is going to knock your socks off,” Chuck said, burying himself in the cabinet.

Violet’s eyes went round as Sarah helped her into her jacket. “Then what’s going to keep my feet warm if my socks are gone?”

“Guess you’ll just have cold feet.”

“Uncle Morgan says that’s how people get sick.”

“It’s fine, we’ve got lots of chicken soup.” Chuck leaned back a little to shoot Sarah a grin. He knew exactly what he was doing.

Indeed, Violet’s eyes widened in pure scandal. “Do you _want_ me to get sick, Daddy?”

“’Course not.”

“Then we can’t let it blow my socks off.”

“Unfortunately, Megabyte, that’s just the price you pay for a good—ah, here it is.” Chuck emerged, clutching what looked like a bright purple trash can lid. It was made of smooth plastic. “That’s just the price you pay for a good tobogganing. We’ll have a memorial for all of our lost socks later and eat chicken soup.”

“But I like my socks. They have ig—ig—’gwanas on them.”

“Iguanas,” Sarah said, politely hiding her smile. She pushed the little cap with its panda bear ears on Violet’s head and moved over to grab her own gear. “And your dad’s talking in metaphors again. We’re not really going to lose our socks.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means it’s going to be awesome,” Chuck said, pulling on his jacket. “All ready to go?”

“Yup!” Violet wrapped herself around Sarah’s forearm once she’d pulled on her own parka. They tromped through the high snow, Sir snuffling along behind them. The cabin that they’d rented for the week sat atop a little hill, a knoll really, with one area off of the back porch that looked like it would make for good sledding, as it was bare of any trees. Violet’s face abruptly took a turn for the cautious. “Is this going to be scary?”

“You’ll have your dad with you, won’t you?” Sarah asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Well, yeah, but…”

“If you’re about to impugn my masculinity, I can take this back inside,” Chuck said.

“I don’t even know what that means!”

“Uh-huh. Guess I’m paying too much for that SAT class you’re taking.”

“What’s a SAT?” Violet said.

“It’s okay, Violet. This will be fun,” Sarah said.

“Have you been to-bogging before?”

“Lots of times.”

They reached the top of the hill and Sarah eyed the slope. For an experienced skier, it was no more than a little bump. Chuck shot her a grin as he settled on the toboggan, folding up his long legs in a comical way to fit onto the plastic lid. “Are you ready, Megabyte?”

Violet gripped Sarah’s arm tighter.

“Don’t worry,” Chuck said, smiling. “I’ll be with you the whole way.”

“Promise?”

“Would I lie to you?”

“Well, if that’s the case, we’re going to go super-fast,” Violet said with a decisive nod, and she let Sarah go to climb on Chuck’s lap.

“How about a push?” Chuck asked Sarah. Sir studied his humans with his head cocked, wondering what sort of strange event was about to take place.

“Oh, fine, if you insist.” She crouched and, eyeing the tree line, pushed hard on his lower back, sending the toboggan and the Bartowskis over the side of the hill. Violet let out an ear-splitting scream that was pure joy as the zoomed down the hill, Chuck’s laughter trailing behind. Sir barked and gave chase, his tail wagging as he crashed down the hill. They skidded into the snow at the bottom, Chuck sliding on his back to keep Violet from falling over. Sarah nearly winced—she’d seen the snow—go up the back of Chuck’s jacket, but duo was red-cheeked and grinning as they tromped back up the hill.

“Again!” Violet insisted.

“You wanna go?” Chuck asked, offering up the toboggan.

And get snow up the back of her jacket? Not likely. “You looked like you were having so much fun,” Sarah said, and he wrinkled his nose at her. But gamely, he went down the hill again and sent Violet back alone.

“Daddy says I can go by myself this time, and he’ll catch me. Can you give me a push?”

Since Chuck gave them a thumbs-up from the bottom of the hill, Sarah gave the girl a tiny push over the side. Sir chased after her in sheer delight.

This went on for a few minutes. Violet raced up the side of the hill, kicking snow around in her tiny purple boots and giggling, breathlessly requesting to go again and again. Sarah played along, giving her the requested push (or holding onto the toboggan over the side of the hill and making Violet giggle), until finally Chuck came back up the hill with his daughter.

“Your turn,” he told Sarah, holding out the toboggan.

She raised an eyebrow that had him turning a shade of red that had nothing to do with the cold. “Gonna go with me?”

He sat down on the toboggan so fast that she was surprised he didn’t fall over in the process. She laughed. “Stay here, we’re gonna go once,” she said to Violet, who was busy hugging the snow-encrusted Sir (who tolerated it with the same amount of love he did for everything involving his Violet).

To the dog, she said, “Stay.” The last thing she wanted was for the dog to drag Violet down the hill in his enthusiasm to chase after the sled. Sir gave her a Would I Do That? look like he could read her thoughts. She had no doubt the innocence was faked, but she climbed onto the toboggan with Chuck. 

They were both so tall that it was a tight fit and she was basically in his lap. He wrapped his arms around her and said, “Ready?”

She grinned. “I guess so.”

“Hey, Megabyte, give us a push, would you?”

Sarah timed it so that when Violet pushed against Chuck as hard as she could, Sarah dug her heels in, pulling the toboggan forward. Her stomach pitched in excitement as they went over the edge together, the plastic sled zooming over the top of the snow.

Or at least it did for a few feet. Unfortunately, Chuck’s height got in the way: his boot caught the edge of a rock, spinning the toboggan so that the snow and trees blurred together. She heard a shout and a _woof_ right before they tipped sideways, rolling hard into the snow. Cold leaked everywhere: under her collar, down the back of her jeans, into the tops of her boots.

“Ugh,” she said, and Chuck groaned.

“Chuck?” 

He didn’t reply, other than to curl inward like a shrimp. He’d landed face-first a few feet away, facing the opposite direction. In a trice, Sarah was across the snow, tugging at his shoulder. “Chuck?” she asked, panic making her heart pound. “Chuck? Are you okay?”

“Ngh,” he said, very eloquently. Sarah finally got him to roll over. Her vision telescoped at the sight of the red on the snow. “Ow.”

“Chuck!” She grabbed the hand that was covering his face, pulling it back. The sight of the blood around his right eye made her wince, but she also started breathing. It looked like it was just a cut and it had missed his temple and his eye both. “Wow. What’d you hit?”

“I think it was a moon.”

She spotted the rock sticking out of the snow. “That’s no moon.”

“Daddy?” Violet called, and Sarah turned to see both the dog and girl moving down the hill.

“Stay there!” Chuck called and Violet pulled up sharply, her lip wobbling. “It’s okay, but stay there. We’ll be up in a minute.”

“Hold still, let me get a look,” Sarah said, tipping her finger under Chuck’s chin so that she could angle his head better. The cut on his forehead was bleeding like a stuck pig, but she was more concerned about how hard he’d hit the rock. She prodded the area gently, wincing as he hissed out a pained breath. “I think you’re going to need stitches.”

Chuck groaned. “Of course I am.”

“There’s an Urgent Care not far,” Sarah said. C’mon, let’s pack some snow on it for now.”

* * *

“No, ma’am,” Sarah said into the phone as Violet squinted and lined up her shot. “As far as I can tell, there wasn’t any head trauma. His pupils were dilating normally, but of course the doctor’s going to know more about that than I do.”

“Here I go,” Violet said. “Are you ready?”

Sarah put her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. “Ready!”

Violet aimed the quarter at the table and bounced it…right next to the little cup they’d picked up at the water cooler down the hall. She let out a long, disheartened sigh.

“What on earth is that noise?” General Beckman asked.

“Sorry, Gen—ma’am,” Sarah said. “As the others are all out, I’m watching Violet while Chuck’s in with the doctor.”

“You should be with the Intersect, Agent Walker.”

“Chuck didn’t want her in there while he was getting stitched up. I assessed the situation and he should be fine on his own.”

“Hm,” was all Beckman had to say to that. “Very well. Send me the reports as soon as you have them. Where was Major Casey during all of this?”

“He elected to spend the day watching over Dr. Bartowski and Dr. Woodcomb,” Sarah lied. “We had no way of anticipating that Chuck would hit his head on a rock while sledding.”

She could tell that the NSA director wasn’t entirely thrilled with that prospect either, but Sarah had no intention of hanging her partner out to dry, so she waited, in case there were further orders. Violet wiggled as she lined yet another shot to go into the cup. 

Finally, Beckman sighed. “Keep me updated,” she said, and hung up.

“Good-bye to you, too, you old bat,” Sarah said under her breath.

“Whuzzat?” Violet asked.

“Nothing,” Sarah said. They were in the waiting room at the Urgent Care, which was empty save for the two of them and the nurse working the front desk. The dried tear tracks on Violet’s cheeks made Sarah think they should probably find the bathroom soon so she could was her face, but for now, the five-year-old was content with sitting in Sarah’s lap on the floor and bouncing quarters into her cup. She’d cried so much on the car ride that she seemed listless and unfocused now. She was going to crash hard the minute they knew Chuck was better, Sarah figured.

But for now, she still needed to be entertained, so Sarah picked up one of the spare quarters from the haphazard pile on the edge of the table, and bounced it expertly into the cup.

Violet immediately twisted. “How do you _do_ that?”

“Lots of practice. You give it a try.”

It took about six more tries (and Sarah grabbing the cup and manipulating it) until Violet’s quarter bounced in, and Sarah determined after Violet grew more and more agitated with every miss that maybe they should focus on something else for a while. Though Violet shed a couple of tears over the end of the game, she changed her mind when Sarah let her spend those quarters in the vending machine to get some fruit snacks. She covered the backs of two flyers with drawings of people and of Sir, chewing on fruit snacks and asking if Chuck was going to be a pirate because one time Moniqua’s daddy had an eye problem and he wore an eye-patch for two weeks and Moniqua’s mom said he looked like a pirate.

“I don’t think so,” Sarah said. “I think it’s just some stitches.”

“But I could wear an eye-patch sometime if you want me to,” said a new voice, and Sarah looked up to see that Chuck, the right side of his face puffy and smeared with an anesthetic, had somehow sneaked up on both of them.

Violet shot to her feet. “Daddy!”

He scooped her up, keeping her on his left side. “Hey, Megabyte. Have a good time out here with Sarah?”

“She taught me how to play Quarters. Does it hurt? Your eye? Does it hurt?”

“Nope. They gave me the good stuff.” He gave her a big, smacking kiss on the cheek and though Violet’s smile wavered, she grinned back at him.

“So you’re probably feeling pretty good right about now,” Sarah said, squinting at him as she climbed to her feet.

He gave her a kiss, too, squeezing her shoulder with his good hand, and it was more of a relief than actually seeing him and knowing he was okay. “For a guy that just lost a fight to a measly little rock, I feel great. I could take on the whole world right now, but I think I’ll just have to settle for taking on the bill.”

“I’ve got it,” Sarah said, giving him a significant look so that he would know she’d already talked to the bosses about it.

He fell back on a tired grin. “Best healthcare out there, I guess. Gotta protect the old noggin.”

In the end, she was right: they hadn’t even gotten out of the parking lot before Violet’s head lolled forward and the little girl was out like a light. “I know exactly how she feels,” Chuck said, sagging back against his seat. He flipped down the sun visor to get a look at his eye in the mirror. “Gosh, that’s almost prettier than you.”

“Hey,” Sarah said, and he laughed. “What’d the doctor say?”

“No concussion, but I’ll have a nice bruise to show off. My planned response to anybody who asks how I got it is ‘You should see the other guy.’ Please go along with it and spare my dignity.”

“Got it. How many stitches?”

“Four, and they hurt. Ugh.” Chuck flipped the visor up and glanced at the backseat again. He frowned. “How’d she hold up?”

“She cried for a while,” Sarah said. “But I think she’s okay. Probably won’t let you out of her sight for a couple of days.”

“There goes our privacy for the rest of the trip.”

“It’s only a couple of days.”

“But then we’re back to the surveillance all the time.” Chuck reached out and grabbed her hand, the one that wasn’t focused on steering the car. “Can’t this trip last forever?”

“Considering that in the space of a week, we’ve kidnapped and drugged a paparazzo, discovered a mystery hacker protecting your privacy online, pissed off your sister, and now you have four stitches in your face?” Sarah raised an eyebrow. He tried to mimic the move right back to her, but winced when he evidently remembered that he’d smashed his own eyebrow on a rock. “As much as I don’t want it to end, maybe it’s for the best.”

“Yeah, I guess you have a point.”

Sarah squeezed his hand. “You could probably pay the ‘take pity on me, I got hit in the face’ card on somebody in the house if we need time alone.”

“I love playing that card,” Chuck said, giving a pained sort of grin. He leaned his head back against the headrest with a sigh. “You know, it’s probably the painkillers talking, but getting hit in the face with a rock aside, and the paparazzo, and Ellie’s upcoming reaction to the fact that I will have a black eye for her family pictures aside, this is probably the best vacation ever.”

“I’m glad you think so,” Sarah said, and they held hands all the way to the pharmacy. Neither of them, Sarah noticed, had brought up the inevitable: they had no idea what was going to happen when they got back to Burbank.


	10. Victory Lap

“Home again, home again, jiggity-jig,” Chuck said, his jaw cracking on a massive yawn as he climbed out of the car. Even though it had only been his head that had been hit, his body felt like Casey had used it as a punching bag, so he stretched out his shoulders and groaned. When he opened the back door, he had to dodge out of the way to avoid being trampled. “Whoa!”

“Sir!” Sarah clicked her tongue and the dog plopped his butt on the ground.

“I need to learn how to do that,” Chuck said. “How are you doing?”

“Little tired.” Sarah put her hands on her lower back and stretched. Because he was still on painkillers, she’d driven the entire way. “Can’t wait to sleep in my own bed, honestly.”

“Yeah, I can’t wait to sleep in your—” Chuck broke off, remembering that they were no longer in the clear. “My bed, either. Hey, Megabyte. Megabyte, we’re home.” He leaned in to jiggle Violet’s foot. When she opened her eyes, her brows immediately lowering in grumpiness or confusion, he grinned. “We’re home. You ready to get out of this car?”

“Home?” Violet perked up. “We’re really back? With Mr. Hoppy Horse and Mr. Nightingale?”

“And Cecil the pig-lizard, Jerry the monkey, and all of those Polly whatsits,” Chuck said, and Violet cheered as he unbuckled her car seat. She wormed free, slipped past him, twirled around Sarah once, and ran for the front door. “I’d say she’s not excited at all.”

“Nope,” Sarah said, her voice dry. She grabbed Violet’s bag from the trunk while he picked up his own. “I’ll come in for a couple of minutes. I want to check and make sure everything’s…”

“Everything’s what?” Chuck asked. He moved his one good eyebrow—they’d figured out he was going to have a scar dissecting his right eyebrow and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that yet—to give her a confused look. 

Sarah leaned close. “You remember the renovations, right?”

“I thought it was a couple new camera angles,” Chuck said. More ways, he thought, to keep them apart.

“Not exactly.” 

Chuck’s eyes widened. “Sarah? What did they do to my house?”

“They put a safe room in it,” Sarah said.

Chuck blinked. “ _Where_?”

“I’ll show you later. C’mon.”

Chuck walked in and a cold tingle crawled down his spine because he couldn’t sense _anything_ different about his house. Not a single item sat out of place. Violet’s extra blanket was still tossed haphazardly over the back of the couch, and there was the print-out with directions to the cabin that they’d forgotten on the end table. “I don’t see anything different,” he said.

Sarah shook her head at him. “You wouldn’t. These guys are good at their jobs.”

“That’s mildly—and by mildly, understand that I mean incredibly—unsettling.”

The other car had beaten them back thanks to getting separated on the freeway, so Ellie was already in the middle of throwing together dinner. Though Ellie invited her to stay, Sarah gave Chuck a quick kiss before she left, making sure to stay where the others could see them (and making the kiss justifiable), and headed back to the Spy Casa. 

That time right after a vacation was always a strange one, Chuck decided as he spent his evening doing laundry, checking his email, and catching up with everything that had fallen to the wayside in their time away. Violet took over an hour to greet all of her toys, checking them over and promising to never, ever leave the sad toys again. Chuck was occasionally called in for extra reassurances.

The tantrum at bath time told him that the nap in the car hadn’t been long enough.

“Daddy?” she asked after the trauma had passed and she was wrapped in a giant blue towel, waiting for him to pick out pajamas.

“Yeah?” She’d outgrown another set, Chuck realized as he dumped the too-small clothes on the floor. 

“Is Sarah—are Sarah and Major Casey Sir going to live with us all the time now?”

“What makes you say that?”

“They went on vacation with us and we all stayed in the same house,” Violet said.

Chuck picked up his old Batman T-shirt. “They did, but they have their own house, Megabyte. Arms up.”

She obliged and he pulled the shirt over her head. “How come?” she asked.

“That’s just the way things are.” _For now_ , Chuck thought. Sarah had probably come to the same conclusion he had: if he stayed the Intersect long enough, they would have to escalate their cover relationship and move in together, likely away from Ellie and Awesome. And while the idea thrilled him, he couldn’t stop the sinking pit in his stomach. They’d avoided talking about their future in Lake Tahoe. There had been no mentions of what would happen, how they would go forward, or if their relationship even had a chance of surviving. She knew that he was throwing his every resource into decoding the Intersect so that he could get the files out of his head, but then what? Would she go off and continue being a spy? Was he enough to keep her around? Was Violet? He didn’t want to be the one to hold her back, as much as he selfishly wanted to hold on and never let go.

It was a mess.

“Here, let’s braid your hair so it’s not a rat’s nest tomorrow,” he said, shoving all of those thoughts aside. “You got the Bartowski curls. You’re cursed for life, kid.”

“I like ’em,” Violet said.

“You say that now but one day you’ll wake up with a clown afro and you’ll come after me with boxing gloves.”

He could tell Violet was still deep in thought as he ran the comb through her hair, as she didn’t whine when he encountered snarls. He tapped her on the top of the head with the comb. “What’s going on in that skull of yours? It makes me nervous when you get quiet. Thoughts of world domination aren’t far behind.”

“What’s that?”

“Our inevitable future if you keep getting smarter at this exponential rate.”

Violet twisted and gave him the _what have you been smoking?_ look she’d perfected as a baby. He grinned and started to braid her hair, yet another skill he never thought he would ever pick up. “Just thinking,” she said.

“What about?”

“Stuff.”

“And things, I’m sure,” Chuck said.

Violet took a deep breath. “How come if Sarah’s not my mom, she loves me more than Mommy does?” 

Chuck’s stomach dropped. “Where’s this coming from? You know your mom loves you.”

“But she was only in Tahoe for a day and Sarah was there the whole time.”

He reached over on top of the dresser and tied off the braid with one of the elastic bands. Why didn’t they hand out pamphlets for this sort of thing? If they could write a manual for JavaScript, it couldn’t be _that_ difficult. “You know how we talked about how Mommy’s job keeps her away sometimes and she can’t see you as much as she wants to?”

“Yeah?”

“It doesn’t mean she loves you less than Sarah.” He wasn’t, he thought, even going to touch the idea of Sarah loving Violet. Ever since Violet had learned to speak, things got repeated in startling volume, both aurally and quantitatively. “Sarah’s able to be around a lot more than your mom. That’s all. And it means sometimes life isn’t fair and we don’t get what we want, even when we’re really good.”

“I don’t like that.”

“Me either. But that’s life, kid.”

Violet frowned. “Can’t I do anything about it?”

“Nope, you’re five, it’s the law.”

“What _can_ I do?”

“Tell you what, I’ll let you pick the bedtime story.”

“But you always let me pick the bedtime story.”

“And don’t you feel privileged?”

Violet gave him the look that told him she knew she was being played, but she was going to go along with it until she could outsmart him. Chuck figured he only had about a year left before that happened. He’d deal with that problem when it came up, which he figured was the ultimate rule of parenting, really. But for now, he read the adventures of Benny, Henry, Jessie, and Violet Alden until Violet was breathing quietly, curled up against her gigantic dog and buried under the stuffed animals they’d had to leave behind for an unconscionably long time.

Downstairs, he found Ellie making her bedtime tea and checking something on her laptop. She raised her eyebrows when he went for a beer instead. “Rough night, sailor?”

“She asked why Sarah loves her more than Sophie.”

Ellie blew out a breath. The expected barb about Sophie, however, didn’t come. Instead, she sipped her tea. “And you didn’t reach for the hundred proof instead of the beer?”

“Thought about it. She also asked why Sarah and Casey don’t live with us full time. I feel like I just went ten rounds with Sugar Ray Leonard.” 

“Well, things _are_ getting pretty serious between the two of you,” Ellie said. “She’s five. She’s going to have questions.”

“Can I buy her stuff to distract her? Is that a valid ploy?”

“Not if you don’t want to see her mug shot all over the news in ten to fifteen years.”

“Knew that plan had a flaw.” He set the beer down and took a seat at the island, working at the kinks in his shoulder. “How come you’re not all ‘grr, argh, Sophie is evil’ right now?”

“She came all the way up to Tahoe so she didn’t miss her weekend. I can give her a break.” Ellie took another sip. “For a little while. How’s your head?”

“Fine, but I’m going to avoid hitting it with a rock again, if that’s okay with you.”

“The photographer emailed over some of the proofs she took yesterday,” Ellie said. She turned her laptop screen to let him get a look. The photographer had posed the family, Morgan, Casey, and Sarah included, on a giant rock behind the cabin. “She offered to Photoshop it out, but I don’t know, I think it tells a story.”

“Of how I got into a fight with the Chinese mafia over the kidnapping of a diplomat,” Chuck said, admiring the rainbow of purples and blues over his temple, “and how I fell into allegiance with a Chinese spy who’s never been spotted on US soil before.”

Ellie blinked at him. 

“Too specific?” Chuck asked, cringing inwardly.

“Weirdly so. Something you want to tell me, Charles?”

“Nope, nothing,” Chuck lied. Sarah was going to kill him if she found out. He gulped down more beer. “Just took a big knock to the head. It addles things a bit.”

“But you’re feeling okay?”

“Feeling fine, sis. No need to worry.”

“But I’ll worry anyway.” Ellie gave him a kiss on his good cheek. “And on that note, I think I’m going to sleep. Early shift tomorrow. G’night, Chuck.”

“Night.”

He stayed in the kitchen after she left, taking her tea and her laptop with her. He liked these moments when the rest of the house was quiet and settled because it gave him a few moments to himself, time to gather all of his thoughts. He knew he should take the beer and go take a crack at the Intersect code, but he was still on vacation until the next day. It could wait. He was just going to enjoy being alone for a minute.

Until Sarah’s head popped around the corner. “Gosh,” she said, “I thought she’d never leave.”

Chuck jumped a very unmanly two feet in the air, his arms flailing. “Where did you come from?”

“The basement,” Sarah said.

“We don’t have a basement.”

“You do now.” She moved over to the fridge and grabbed a beer. That was another thing he had noticed in the past week: Sarah had relaxed around him. Before the vacation, the tension in the air—and trying to hide that tension—had been thick, but in Tahoe, it had been almost like seeing a different Sarah, one that was quicker to grin and laugh, and if he was completely honest with himself, he was a goner, head over heels, the whole nine yards, any cliché he could possibly think of. She shot him a grin. “Well, are you coming?”

“Coming where?”

“To the basement.” She grabbed his wrist and pulled him out of the stool, hauling him toward the living room. 

“I repeat, we don’t have—” Chuck broke off when Sarah tapped the door jamb with the side of her fist and a keypad made out of blue light appeared in a space that he knew for a fact had just been a wall previously. “What the hell?”

“Secret base,” Sarah said. She keyed in six numbers and the wall slid to the left, revealing a doorway.

“What the…”

“C’mon.” She tugged him after her. The door opened into a dark staircase that led down below his house, lit by fluorescent lights. Everything had an industrial feel, as the walls were stamped sheet metal. Chuck gaped, his jaw dropping farther when the stairs led into a giant, hollow room that contained an entire wall of computer monitors, a conference table, an armory, and what looked like three separate office cubicles. Casey stood by the wall of monitors, arms crossed over the chest of his black polo tee (apparently vacation really _was_ over if Casey was back to dressing as Death’s minion).

“What the hell is this place?” Chuck asked.

“Our new base,” Casey said. “It’s a little rudimentary yet, but they only had a week to perfect it.” 

“They built this place in a _week_?” Chuck asked, gaping as he looked up at the halogen lights overhead. Then he spotted the servers in the corner. “Are those—did they—”

“Built to your specifications,” Sarah said, looking proud. “I made sure.”

Chuck ran his hand over his face, his mind whirling too fast for cogent speech for a long moment. “Do you know what this means?” he asked, fingers itching to open up the front of the server racks and view the shiny interiors. “Do you know what this means?”

“Nerd stuff, probably,” Casey said.

“I heard that,” Chuck said, but he was too busy goggling at the secret bunker _under his house_ to take offense. “I’ll be able to create a much smaller scale of an Intersect simulator, which is good for all of us. This is amazing. How much did this even _cost_ —actually, don’t answer that. When you said there was a safe room, I wondered, but this is—this is _impressive._ ”

“Thank you,” Sarah said. “It was the bosses’ idea, but we had a hand in the design. That hallway leads to our place, that hallway leads to a safe exit two blocks away, and that hallway, obviously, goes back into your living room. There’s a secondary safe room built off of Violet’s room that I’ll show you later.”

“And the computers?” Chuck asked, gaping at the wall of monitors.

Sarah gestured in an ‘All yours’ sort of way that had him bouncing forward. “Obviously, it’s connected to your computer upstairs, we looped the system.”

And the government would be watching his every move, Chuck knew, but he couldn’t contain the sheer amount of pure nerdy excitement as Sarah explained all of the features of the room, including the monitor for Violet’s bedroom that could be activated when he was down there. “Can’t use the base all the time, but it’s a good alternative,” Casey said. “No letting the spawn down here.”

“Hey,” Chuck and Sarah both said.

He rolled his eyes. “I’ve had enough of you two. Walker, give him the manual. Bartowski, try not to break too many laws while I’m asleep.”

“Such a happy soul,” Chuck said as Casey left through the hallway that led to the Spy Casa. “That vacation really did him wonders. His skin is practically glowing. Like a whole new man that was just waiting for a week of R&R to get out of the old man and stop hiding his light under a bushel.”

“Oh, stop,” Sarah said, though she laughed and took a seat on the desk beside the keyboard. He’d already started playing with the computer during their explanation of Castle—that was what they were calling the brand new underground bunker beneath his house, apparently—but Sarah had kept her distance. Now she sat so close he could practically feel her body heat. She held out a giant book. 

“Holy crap, he wasn’t kidding about there being a manual. This thing weighs more than my old C++ book.” Chuck grunted a little when he picked it up—it was bigger than the phonebook—and started flipping through pages. “Oh, interesting. And yes, I realize it makes me a nerd that I look at a manual and think it’s fascinating. No need to point that out.”

“I marked some important passages for you,” Sarah said.

“You read it already? I’m starting to think I’m not the only nerd that…” Chuck trailed off as he flipped to the first post-it, his eyebrows drawing low over his eyes. The page was a diagnostic on the camera systems, including the possible ways they might be overridden without a single glitch in the system. When he looked up in confusion, Sarah had an eyebrow raised.

It took him a full twenty seconds after that to understand. “Wha-oh,” he said. “Interesting. Pretty helpful book, this. I’ll have to read this section very carefully.”

“I’m sure I can provide some incentive,” Sarah said, smirking. 

Chuck breathed a couple of times to lower his blood pressure, though internally he wanted to jump around. Sarah had found a way to circumvent the cameras in his room. Sure, they would have to be careful, but he wasn’t going to have to go months on just the power of a look or a stolen kiss alone. He let out a long, relieved breath.

“Yeah,” Sarah said. “Exactly. How long do you think it’ll take you to…read that?”

“The page or the whole—oh, the whole thing? Uh.” Chuck scratched the back of his head. “Couple of days? At most?”

“Might want to get on that, then.” Her hand grazed his, very lightly, and he felt goosebumps prickle up his spine. “I trust you’ll be very efficient about it.”

“Uh, yeah, I mean, completely, yeah. E-efficient.” He felt very much like squirming in that moment, which apparently only made Sarah grin harder. “Stop that,” he said under his breath.

She leaned close. “But it’s so much fun.”

When the computer screen behind her beeped, she jolted and for a split-second, Chuck had his revenge. The vindication faded when he actually glanced at the screen. It had been showing a schematic of Castle two seconds before, but now it was completely blank.

“What’d you do?” Sarah asked.

“I didn’t do anything.” Confused, Chuck entered a simple ping command, but the screen stayed blank. Around them, lights began to dim. Every monitor blinked out, except for the monitor showing Violet’s room.

Words in giant, blocky text began to flash over the screen: AM I INTERRUPTING SOMETHING?

Chuck’s heartbeat began started to accelerate. “Sarah? Have the bosses been watching _War Games_ lately?”

WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY A GAME?

“Very funny, General,” Chuck said, typing another command into the computer. “Also I would not have guessed you’d be up on that particular oeuvre of eighties films.”

Sarah rose to her feet. “Chuck, I don’t think that’s Beckman,” she said, resting her hand on the small of her back.

The command Chuck attempted did absolutely nothing, but the screen changed anyway: VERY GOOD, AGENT WALKER.

“Who is this?” Sarah asked, pulling her gun free. “What are you doing in our system?”

“What the hell?” Chuck asked, and the goosebumps that rose along his arms had nothing to do with Sarah’s effect on his blood pressure now. He checked the monitor to Violet’s room out of instinct; she was still there, clutching one of Sir’s giant paws while she slept. It didn’t do much to relieve the tension locking his spine together, though.

I AM A FRIEND, the computer screen read.

“Friends don’t hack military-grade firewalls to play games,” Sarah said.

I MEAN NO HARM. I WOULD LIKE TO HELP.

“Help with what?” Sarah asked.

THE INTERSECT.

Sarah’s shift in stance was immediate; in an instant, she had her gun pointed at the monitor. “How the hell do you know what that is?” 

Chuck cleared his throat. “Shooting the monitor won’t do anything, just for the record.”

“Not now,” Sarah said. “Tell me how you know about the Intersect, you son of a—”

BECAUSE I CREATED IT.

For the space of three heartbeats, Chuck remained absolutely still, staring at the words on the monitor with a strange whooshing noise in his ears. He’d done extensive research on the creation of the Intersect, anything the bosses were willing to give him, but they’d led him to believe that the creators were all dead, that everything had perished in the explosion that had taken the original Intersect and left it wallowing between his ears.

“Prove it,” he said. “Prove it right now or I will destroy every computer in here.”

Instead of a line of text, though, the screen went completely black. Chuck didn’t dare breathe, not until a symbol slowly faded into focus in the center of the monitor. He had approximately a half second to gather details—a circle with stylized lines sticking out of it that weren’t unlike the state flag of New Mexico—before the flash hit. Information embedded in a photograph of breakfast, schematics of a room, architectural floor plans giant circuits, audio and sound from an old lecture on subliminal imagery and psychology, all of it filtered through his brain and just like that, Chuck _knew_.

“Orion,” he said, gasping as he sagged back in his chair. “Orion, that’s—he created the Intersect. They thought he was a ghost, like a myth or a—a story that was passed around the intelligence communities, but he’s real. You’re Orion.”

YES.

“They told me the Intersect creators were dead,” Sarah said, her grip on her gun tightening.

I HAVE DIED MANY TIMES, AGENT WALKER. IT NEVER STICKS.

“Why do you want to help me?” Chuck asked. He knew Orion wasn’t in the monitor, just like he was sure the scientist was powerful enough to override Castle’s security protocols and use their own system against them. He was probably somewhere in Malaysia or London or something, but looking at the monitor gave him a point to focus on. His heart had started pounding in earnest and he could feel his hands shaking, but he didn’t care. He’d never been this _close_ to anything that might help him get the Intersect out of his head before.

On the monitor above Chuck’s head, Violet let out a sigh in her sleep and Sir nosed at her.

BECAUSE THE INTERSECT IS MY MISTAKE. AND I MUST FIX MY MISTAKES.

“How do you know who we are?” Sarah asked.

“He’s Orion,” Chuck said, tapping his temple. “There’s nothing this guy doesn’t know.”

“He’s that good?”

I AM, the computer screen read. BUT I MUST GO. TIME IS RUNNING OUT.

“Wait!” Chuck leaned forward. “If this is your mistake, can you help me? I want it out of my head, can you help me with that?”

There was such a long pause that for a moment, Chuck feared that Orion had vanished entirely. He stopped breathing, teeth clenched while the air seemed to thrum around him.

Finally, though, words appeared: THIS IS ALL I CAN DO FOR NOW. And a complex mathematical equation scrolled across the screen. Chuck yelped and scrambled for a pen, scribbling frantically. The second he wrote out the final variable, the code vanished. The words I’LL BE IN TOUCH appeared and vanished just as quickly, and the lights came back up as each monitor sprang back to life, showing precisely what they had before Orion had visited.

Sarah whirled to look around. “What the hell was all that?”

“I don’t believe it,” Chuck said, staring at the messy scrawl on the paper in front of him. His hands shook even harder as he launched the latest strand of code he’d been trying to decrypt before the vacation in Tahoe. He’d been working with the Feitzshans Theorem, trying to figure out if there was a correlation he could use, but he’d approached all of it all wrong. His base theory between the subliminal imaging and the data transfer was complete crap. If he used this equation…

“Chuck?” Sarah touched his shoulder and he realized that from the tone, it wasn’t the first time she’d said his name. “Chuck, what’s going on?”

“He gave me…he gave me the key to figuring it out, Sarah.”

“Who the hell is he?”

“According to my flash?” Chuck blew out a breath, still shaking his head. He couldn’t believe it was that simple, that it had been right there in front of him the whole time. “He created the Intersect. And I think he’s the one that’s been looking out for me, you know, online.”

“What?”

“I can’t think of many hackers that would be powerful enough to delete pictures of Violet and me like he did,” Chuck said. He pointed. “Why would he take everything down but leave that running? First thing I would have done is race out of here to get to Vi. So it makes sense, doesn’t it? If he created the thing in my head, he’d have reason to want to protect me—and by default her—too.”

Sarah blanched. “I have to call Casey.”

“And the bosses. They’re going to want to hear this.” Chuck took a deep breath. “Sarah, I think I can reverse-engineer the Intersect.”

Sarah grabbed his shoulder, her fingers digging in like five sharp points of pain. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying the game has changed. Don’t freak out, but I think I can get the Intersect out of my head.”


End file.
